Bitterroot

Chapter 27

Thursday morning I drove down to Stevens-ville, then east of town toward the Sapphires and Nicki Molinari's ranch. It was raining in the south and dust was blowing out of the valley, and in the distance there were veins of lightning inside the dust and rain. When I turned into Molinari's drive his man Frank was trying to catch up a horse that was eating the petunias in the flower bed.

He ran at the horse with a rope, then threw dirt clods at it. He tried to whip it across the flanks with a fishing rod and instead tripped over the garden hose and was almost kicked in the face.

Nicki Molinari came out of the barn, waving his hands.

"Frank, Frank, wrong way to go about it," he said.

"He ate all your flowers," Frank said.

"We'll get some new ones. Look, give him these molasses balls. See, let him eat them out of your palm so he don't bite your fingers," Molinari said.

"He went to the bathroom all over the walk," Frank said.

"I'll hose it off. I'm gonna talk to my guest now. You did fine, Frank," Molinari said.

He watched Frank walk into the barn with the horse following behind him.

"You want a job in personnel management?" he asked.

"I hear you got over your objections to Cleo Lonnigan."

"What, you think she's working my joint or something?"

"It occurred to me," I said.

"Well, you thought right. It would be the smart move. Cleo gives me my money, I remodel your bone structure. Except the truth is I like you. Don't ask me why."

"What's the angle with Cleo?"

"Horizontal. It's the nature of the world, Counselor."

I looked away at his neighbor's property. There was a small white church by the road, and the neighbor was up on the roof, hammering down shingles. I looked back at Molinari. For some reason his face seemed different, the eyes sunken, the skeletal outline of his skull just below the skin.

"What are you staring at?" he asked.

"I think you're going to come to a bad end."

"You're a fortune-teller or something?" he said, and tried to grin. "Hey, Counselor, you need to get that look off your face."

"It's the way you use people. I think it's about to come back on you."

"I'm in a good mood here. But you're using up my patience."

"You're a victim, Nicki. You just don't know it."

"I'm a victim?"

"She's a physician. You're a graduate of Terminal Island. Who do you think is going to win all the marbles?"

"Frank, get out here!" he yelled at the barn.

I DROVE BACK to Missoula and parked at Temple's motel, and we took a walk down by the river and she put her hand in mine. The current in the river looked fast and green and coppery in the late-afternoon sunlight, and rafters were floating under the walk bridge that led to the university, splashing foam into the air with their oars. I told Temple about my visit with Nicki Molinari and felt her release my hand.

"Cleo Lonnigan again. What's this guy got that she wants?" she said.

"I'm not sure."

"Why'd you call Molinari a victim?"

I looked out at the rafters rolling and spinning through the riffle and wished I had not gotten into the subject.

"I smelled an odor I'd almost forgotten. At first I thought it was on the wind. Soldiers talk about it," I said.

"I don't know if I want to hear this," Temple said.

"I stuck playing cards in the mouths of dead people, Temple. I couldn't wash their smell off my hand. Like they'd breathed something on my skin. I smelled it on Molinari. I didn't imagine it."

"I'm not going to listen to this. No, no, not today. See you in the ice cream store," she said, walking ahead of me, shaking her hands in the air, smiling giddily at people passing in the opposite direction.

The next morning the phone rang in Doc's living room. Maisey answered it, then handed the receiver to me.

"That little puke Terry Witherspoon just left the department. He's filing a hit-and-run charge against Maisey Voss," the sheriff said.

"What are you going to do?"

"She deliberately smashed in the front of Wyatt Dixon's car."

"Witherspoon started it. She should have run over him," I said.

"I can't believe you're an attorney."

I waited in the silence. Then I said, "Did you call here for another reason?"

I heard him exhale against the phone receiver. "I drove out to Cleo Lonnigan's yesterday. She told me this ATF agent, this guy Rackley, was out to see her last week. Rackley says her son and husband were probably killed by outlaw bikers."

"How do you know he actually said this?"

"I called him up. He says Lamar Ellison may have been mixed up in it."

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

"Because maybe Cleo was right all along and I was saying otherwise. Because maybe other individuals had reason to set Lamar Ellison on fire."

"Did you tell that to the district attorney?"

"None of your business," he said.

"You're a good man, Sheriff."

"Tell my old woman that. Have you seen Sue Lynn Big Medicine?"

"No, sir."

"Where's your son?"

After a beat, I said, "I couldn't say right offhand."

"That's what I thought," the sheriff said. The line went dead.

I walked into the kitchen, where Doc was washing out three gutted rainbows in the sink and rinsing the rubber liner of his creel.

"Why would Nicki Molinari insist West Coast wiseguys killed Cleo's husband and son if somebody else did it?" I asked.

"People are scared of the Mob. He wants to hold a threat over her head without seeming to be involved."

The clarity of Doc's reply made me wonder about the depth and adequacy of my own thought processes.

Terry Witherspoon did not have memories, not in the ordinary sense. The high school he attended had been a place he went in the morning and left in the afternoon, neither better nor worse for the experience. He learned that reticence ensured he would not be bothered by others; in fact, reticence in school was a way to purchase virtual invisibility. If pressed in a difficult situation, he just grinned at the corner of his mouth and flipped his hair out of his face and let others wonder what was on his mind.

Teachers pretended to believe in the importance of what they taught, art and history, save the Earth, respect your fellowman, but they shopped at Wal-Mart like everybody else, while their neighbors' businesses went under. His classmates sang in church on Sundays and Wednesday nights but somehow the girls got pregnant anyway. He wondered why they all spent so much time convincing themselves they were somebody else.

When he was a junior in high school his father, who fixed bicycles and sharpened lawn mowers, was seventy-two and his mother sixty. The three of them lived in a small house at the end of an alley, behind a loan agency, and did not own a car. Across the street was an empty lot where black people planted gardens in the spring. Terry's mother often cleaned houses with black people and made friends with them and worked alongside them in their gardens. When she came home at night, sometimes with a paper bag full of vegetables, she smelled of sweat and the dirt in her clothes. In fact, she smelled just like the black people she worked with.

A little girl broke her tooth on a BB that was inside a watermelon picked from the field. Terry was caught on the loan agency's rooftop a week later, air rifle in hand.

Aside from his two-beer visit to the VFW hall every Saturday afternoon, Terry's father spent most of his waking hours in his shed, which was hung with bicycle frames and wheels and narrow tires. He seldom wore his false teeth and his cheeks were collapsed inward on his jawbones so that his expression was wizened and severe, although in reality he appeared to have no emotions at all.

The night of the junior prom Terry went into the shed to tell his father supper was ready.

"What's your name again?" the father said.

"My name? I'm Terry."

"Where's my son? He's supposed to help me."

"I'm your son."

The father studied Terry's face. "Yeah, I can see the resemblance to your mother. Her people always had that pallor. Like they was shut up in a root cellar," he said.

Terry put on the new suit he had bought with the money he had earned at the grocery and walked to the junior prom and convinced himself he really didn't care about the prom one way or another; he was just going there to watch the jocks and snarfs and frumps and socials and sluts with their pushed-up boobs jerk each other around. He stood by himself for most of the dance, creating the illusion of activity, taking a smoke outside, walking down the emptiness of the corridor to the boys' rest room, constantly fixing his glasses on his nose, lifting the corner of his mouth in an expression that could be interpreted as either disapproval or interest.

Then he asked a girl to dance. Her father was a Mason and real estate broker who sold lakefront lots in the mountains to people from the North, and the family lived in a two-story brick house with a gazebo on the lawn, on a hill above the town. She was plump across the middle and chubby under the chin, but she looked cute with her Dutch-boy haircut, and she had always spoken to him in the halls, unlike most of the girls whose families had money.

"I'd love to dance, Terry," she said, then leaned close to his ear, her breath husky and cold and scented with raspberry from the wine coolers the jocks had been handing out in the parking lot. "I have to go to the bathroom. I'll be right back."

The girl walked with two of her friends down the corridor, the three of them looking back at him briefly and giggling. He went out the side exit and lit a cigarette in the shrubbery and looked up at the moon. Then he realized the window to the girls' rest room was right behind him, the top portion of the glass pulled down for ventilation.

"Did you check that suit? Neon blue with white socks. He must have gotten it at a black funeral home," the plump girl said.

"Don't knock those socks, Jenny. They match his dandruff," another girl said, and the three of them howled.

He stood a long time in the shadows, his cheeks tingling, the blood singing in his ears. Then he walked down the empty street, back into his own neighborhood, the music from the dance fading behind him. The sodium street lamps glowed like a gray vapor on the clapboard houses, the outdated cars, and the vegetable gardens that people grew out of necessity, not choice. He walked past his house on the alley where his parents were watching television, out to the lounge on the highway, where the vinyl upholstery was red and black and the bartender was built like a steroid addict and wore gold earrings and black leather, and the traveling salesmen stayed late.

The man who picked him up at the bar said he was from Raleigh but he had a Yankee accent.

"If I could buy you the best thing in the world, what would it be?" the man asked.

"Buster Bars at the Dairy Queen. I ate twelve of them once," Terry said.

"You're still all boy, aren't you?" the man said, and touched his hair in the car.

At the motel Terry ate the Buster Bars out of a paper bag, taking his time, enjoying each bite while the man tried to suppress the discomfiture his desire was causing him.

"There's a refrigerator over here. You can save some of them for later," the man said. "I'll think about it," Terry said. When they made love Terry realized for the first time in his life the power a female, or one taking her role, could exercise over a man.

Later, the man showered and dressed and began talking about a trip he was taking to Hollywood with his son, who went to a private college in Massachusetts. A neon sign glowed through the curtain and gave a peculiar purple hue and shape to the man's mouth, like a distorted flower. Terry could not remove his stare from the man's mouth and the way it moved against the pallor of his skin. He found himself becoming angrier and angrier, although he didn't know why.

"Why don't you stop talking? Why don't you shut up about your son?" Terry said.

"Beg your pardon?" the man said, turning from the mirror where he was knotting his necktie. When Terry didn't reply the man grinned in the mirror and continued knotting his tie. "I'd like to call you when I'm in town again. This evening was special for me, Terry. You make me feel young."

Terry felt a rage like someone kicking open the door to a furnace next to his skin. He drove the man's head down on the toilet bowl and smashed his mouth again and again on the rim until the porcelain was striped with red from the top of the bowl to the waterline. Then he emptied the man's wallet and ripped his watch off his wrist and his class ring off his finger and shook the wallet's contents into the toilet bowl and dropped the wallet in on top of them.

"There's still a Buster Bar in the fridge," he said, and jiggled with laughter.

Nine months in the state reformatory, then one day after his eighteenth birthday he was discharged and his records sealed. Not a bad deal. He got a GED inside and learned how to make prune-o, hot-wire a car, cook down diet pills and shoot them up with an eyedropper, and dive Dumpsters for people's credit card and phone and bank account numbers.

But the revelatory event that would change his life came about by pure accident.

He wandered into a gun show at the high school gym. The building was packed with hunters, collectors, Civil War enthusiasts, competition shooters, people Terry had never taken seriously and did not take seriously now. But at one display table was a group of four men who were different from everyone else in the room. Their bodies had the hardness of professional soldiers, and they wore neatly trimmed goatees and black T-shirts and their arms were scrolled from the shoulder to the wrist with intricate tattoos. They grinned at the people drifting up and down the aisle, but there was no mistaking the black electricity in their eyes, the dried testosterone in their clothes, the invasive look that made other people swallow involuntarily.

Their table was spread with Lugers and Nazi memorabilia. Terry picked up a pamphlet with a headline about a Zionist Occupational Government.

"What's a Zionist?" Terry asked.

One of the men pushed a chair toward him with his foot. "Have a seat, kid," he said, then rested his arm across Terry's shoulders.

The man's arm felt heavy and thick across the back of Terry's neck, a sensual heat and power transferring from the man's body to his. When Terry glanced out at the people in the aisle, their eyes quickly turned away. Terry felt his loins tingle like a swarm of bees.

It WAS dusk at the compound now, the river streaked with the last gold light of the day, the air cool and smelling of cut hay and Carl's prize Angus, which were drinking in the slough.

But it wasn't a good evening for Terry. Wyatt was still mad about Maisey Voss destroying the front of his car and had told him if he wanted to go anywhere, he could walk or hitchhike, because neither Wyatt nor Carl would give him a vehicle to drive.

Now Wyatt and Carl had gone to the drive-in movie in Missoula and left Terry to his own devices. Terry walked along the riverbank to the campground upstream from the compound and baited his hand line with a piece of corn and cheese and threw it into an eddy behind a rotted cottonwood. The mountains on the western rim of the valley were purple with shadow, lighted only on the high crests where the snow had not melted.

He heard a car door open and feet crunching on the silt and pebbles behind him, then he turned and stared into the face of the biggest man he had ever seen.

"Walk up there and get in the trunk of the car," the man said. The voice was flat, mechanical, clotted with rust.

"Fuck that," Terry said.

The man slapped Terry on the ear, so hard Terry thought the drum was broken. He jerked Terry's line from his hand and threw it into the river, and, by his belt, dragged him stumbling up the embankment and pushed him headlong into the trunk of a small car and slammed down the hatch.

A half hour later Terry was sitting in a heavy wooden chair inside a batting cage, his wrists roped to the chair, staring at an automatic pitching machine loaded with scuffed baseballs. The cage was located inside a closed barn, and motes of dust and wisps of hay floated in the haze of the electric lights that ran the length of the horse stalls.

The man who had kidnapped him had not spoken a word since removing him from the car trunk.

"You work for that doctor? Is this over Maisey?" Terry said.

But the man did not answer.

A side door opened and a man in a cutoff baseball jersey and blue jeans that were new and stiff from the box stepped inside the barn. His hair was black and combed, his skin olive-toned, his eyes brown like a deer's.

He leaned over in the shadows and picked up a remote-control button that was attached to the pitching machine.

"You did a one-bit in North Carolina?" the man said.

Terry ran the tip of his tongue along his lips. Don't give a smart answer, he thought.

"Not exactly. I was in the reformatory. I bashed a fudge packer who came on to me," Terry said.

"I can respect that. Now, all you got to do is tell me and Frank the truth about a couple of things, and we'll take you home. This machine pitches up to seventy miles an hour. You getting the picture on this?"

"No," Terry said, then realized he'd just given the wrong answer.

The man's right thumb moved and the mechanical arm of the pitching machine fired a ball into Terry's chest, then reset itself for another pitch. Terry felt as if someone had driven an auger into his breastbone.

"I know, it hurts. I been hit by it," the man said.

"You're Nicki Molinari," Terry said.

"What's in a name?" Molinari said.

Terry started to reply, but Molinari held a finger up for him to be quiet.

"Two years ago, on July Fourth, a man and a little boy were killed on the Clearwater National Forest. Who you think did that?" Molinari said.

"How am I supposed to know?" The machine clanked and Terry leaned sideways, straining against the chair, but the ball caught him on the collarbone. He tried to eat his pain, but he couldn't bite down on the groan that welled out of his chest.

"Was it Lamar Ellison?" Molinari asked.

"Lamar? He was a snitch for the ATF."

"So?" Molinari said.

Terry knew he needed to provide an answer, but he couldn't think, couldn't sort out all the wise remarks and insults that he had always carried around like a sheaf of arrows.

"Ask Wyatt. He celled with Lamar," he said, and realized how afraid he actually was.

"The rodeo clown? You think I go to clowns for my information? That's what you're telling me?" Molinari said.

"No."

"You think anybody's-fuck from a state reformatory can lie and call me stupid on my own property, in front of a business associate, and just walk out of here?"

Terry was drowning in Molinari's words.

"I was fishing. I turn around and a guy who looks like Frankenstein locks me in his car trunk. I don't deserve this."

"I don't think you should call Frank names, kid. You want to apologize to Frank for that?" Molinari said.

Terry hung his head and shut his eyes and waited for another ball to hit him. But nothing happened.

"I'm gonna fix a sandwich. Then I'll be back. Search your memory about that deal on the Clearwater National Forest," Molinari said, and went out the side door of the barn.

It was quiet a long time, then Frank stood up from the sawhorse he had been sitting on and folded his huge palm around the trigger for the pitching machine. Terry remembered thinking his jaws looked like dirty sandpaper, his recessed eyes like those of a man whose moment had come.

A HALF HOUR LATER the side door opened again and Molinari entered the batting cage and reached down out of a red haze and lifted Terry's chin with one knuckle.

"You gonna make it?" he asked.

Terry's face felt as if it had been stung all over by hornets.

"Wyatt's gonna-" he began.

"The clown again?" Molinari said.

"Wyatt-" Terry said, but could not clear the blood from his mouth to speak.

Molinari looked at Frank, who shook his head negatively. Molinari chewed on the ball of his thumb and gazed thoughtfully into the shadows, then spit a piece of skin off his tongue.

"Spread some raincoats on the car seat and get him out of here," he said.

"He called you a dago and greaseball," Frank said.

"I've answered to worse. Call Phoenix and L.A. and tell them I want everything they got on this militia guy, what's-his-name, Hinkel."

He picked up a baseball that had rolled out on the floor and tossed it into an apple basket.

"This valley used to be a nice place. Now we got half the riffraff in the United States moving here," he said.

Just before 11 P.M. that night, at the end of what had probably been the longest day of Terry Witherspoon's life, he was stopped by a Ravalli County sheriff's deputy only two hundred yards from the entrance to Carl Hinkel's compound. The moon was high and yellow over the mountains, the upside-down American flag popping on the metal pole in Carl's yard.

Terry was almost home free. Don't wise off, he told himself. Turn into an ice cube. Tell him you fell off a truck. Let Wyatt deal with Molinari.

In minutes Terry had forgotten all his resolutions and was cuffed and in the backseat of the cruiser and on his way to the county jail.