Bitterroot

Chapter 28

The next day was Saturday. A turnkey walked me down to the holding cell where Terry Wither-spoon had spent the night.

"Have you been spit on lately?" he asked. "Can't say that I have," I replied. "Don't stand too close to the bars." The turnkey walked back down the corridor and sat at a small table and picked up a newspaper.

The cell was splattered with food from a serving tray that Terry had thrown against the wall. He stood under a barred window, wrinkling his nose under his glasses.

"What are you doing here?" he asked.

"The sheriff in Missoula told me you were in the slams. I thought I'd drop by for a chat," I said.

"I should be in a hospital. They put me in jail."

"You stuck your finger in a deputy sheriff's eye?"

"It was an accident. He grabbed my arm. It hurt."

Then I watched a phenomenon to which I had never seen the exception in dealing with sociopathic behavior. Terry threw a temper tantrum, his voice hissing with spleen. He was the victim, not others. It was he who had been wronged by the world, the fates, the cosmos, maybe even by his own genes. It was my obligation to be an attentive and sympathetic listener. Never mind the fact he had buried a friend of mine alive. Nothing was of consequence to him except his own pain and the unfairness with which he had been treated by a pair of greaseball humps like Molinari and Frank and now a bunch of Montana hillbillies with badges they probably got out of cereal boxes.

"I might watch what I said to these guys, Terry."

"Why?" he asked. "They don't like you."

Then, as though I were supposed to fix the situation for him, he said, "Wyatt and Carl aren't home. I got a five-hundred bond. Somebody's got to go a bond for me."

"You think Wyatt Dixon gives a shit what happens to you?" I asked.

He pushed up his glasses and looked at me, uncomprehending.

"He might get around to going your bond but he's not going to take on Nicki Molinari. Nicki's a made guy, Terry, a genuine Sicilian badass. You think Wyatt wants to get into it with the Mob because you got hit with some baseballs?"

"Wyatt's my friend."

"Could be," I said, and leaned on one arm against the cell door and looked down the corridor at the turnkey, who was reading the paper.

"Somebody needs to take the weight for those dead ATF agents. The real shooter is probably up in Canada now. Think about it, Terry. Who's the most likely candidate in your bunch? Somebody who wanted to do Sue Lynn and didn't know the agents were sitting in her car? Somebody who never had a job except as a box boy?"

Then he did something I didn't expect. He walked toward the cell door and gripped the bars loosely with his palms, his weight on one foot, his hip cocked at an angle. He pursed his lips, as though he had reached a conclusion that would affect both of us. His eyes were strangely serene, the way dark water is, devoid of all light and moral conflict and perhaps, at least in that moment, any fear of mortality.

When he spoke his voice was suddenly feminine. A smile played around his mouth.

"Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm at the point I don't have any more to lose. Say hello to Maisey for me. You can do that for me, can't you?" he said. His breath touched my skin like vapor off dry ice.

That evening I took Temple to an Italian restaurant on Higgins called Zimorino's Red Pies Over Montana. The tables and bar were crowded with tourists and people from the university. In the back of the room, wearing a suit and tie, I saw Amos Rackley eating by himself.

"You feel sorry for him?" Temple said.

"Yeah, I guess."

"If Lamar Ellison was a snitch and the feds knew he killed Cleo Lonnigan's child, our man there deserves whatever pangs of conscience he has."

"Maybe."

"No maybe about it," Temple said.

I started to say something else, but let it go.

In the middle of our dinner a shout went up from the bar. On the screen of the TV attached high up on the wall was the face of Xavier Girard.

"That guy's on CNN?" Temple said.

"Looks like it," I said, and continued to eat.

But Temple's attention remained fixed on the TV screen, where Xavier was promoting his new book and being interviewed by the best-known talk-show host in the industry.

"Girard's talking about Nicki Molinari," Temple said.

I got up from the table and walked to the bar. Xavier had set aside a copy of his new book and was now expounding on his work in progress.

"Nicki is right out of Elizabethan theater," he said. "He volunteered for the Army and Vietnam to get away from his father. But he ended up in a godforsaken outpost in Laos, surrounded by oceans of poppy fields. He escaped out of a Pathet Lao prison camp by shoving his best friend off a helicopter skid at five hundred feet. He's a tormented human being, Larry. I like him, so does my wife, a little too much, to tell you the truth, but I've never underestimated his potential for violence."

The talk-show host propped his chin on his thumb and smiled slightly.

"You sure you want to be saying all this?" he asked.

"Oh, Nicki's become one of the family, so to speak. He put up a big chunk of money for my wife's new picture."

"I hear you're separating," the host said.

"Yeah, who'd believe it?" Xavier said, and laughed and looked knowingly at the camera.

I went back to the table and sat down.

"I wonder if Molinari watches much television," I said.

Later, we went to a movie in the refurbished vaudeville theater by the river. When we came out the sun had gone down and the moon had risen like a yellow planet over the Bitterroots. We walked down an outside flight of iron stairs to a parking area under the Higgins Street Bridge. There was a supper club below the movie theater, and the wide glass doors were open and an orchestra was playing dance music.

"You want to go inside?" Temple said.

"No," I said.

"Why not?" she asked.

"Because right here is good enough."

I put one arm around her waist and lifted her right hand in mine, but she dropped my hand and put both arms around my neck and we danced in the parking lot, under the great dome of heaven itself, surrounded by mountains that had changed little since the Earth was new, in a breeze that smelled of the river and all the trees and flowers that grew along it, to music that had been composed sixty years ago by Benny Goodman. An audience of college kids watched us from the bridge overhead and applauded when the song ended.

Maybe the Earth is better or more beautiful and life more wonderful in another place than it was at that moment. But I seriously doubt it.

Lucas did not return that night from his job at the Milltown Bar. Just before dawn I heard a car out in the field and I looked out the back door and saw Lucas get out of the car and walk around the side of the house toward his tent. I slipped on my jeans and boots and a nylon vest and put on my hat and walked down in the grayness of the morning to the riverbank.

"Can I come in?" I said, pulling back the flap to his tent.

"Hope you didn't worry about where I was at," he said,

"Just because you're out all night? Not in the least. Who dropped you off?"

"An Indian guy."

"That clears it up. Do I smell perfume?"

"Lay off it, Billy Bob." He was sitting up on his sleeping bag, pulling off his boots.

"Where's Sue Lynn?" I asked.

"What are you gonna do if I tell you?"

"She's wanted for questioning in a double homicide. Use your brains, Lucas."

He threw one of his boots against the wall of the tent. "I knew you was gonna get on my case," he said.

"You want the ATF to find her first?" I said.

His face was fatigued, his hair in his eyes. He folded his arms around his knees and glowered into space.

"She says Carl Hinkel's people are looking for her. They think she knows stuff she don't," he said.

I didn't reply. I went out the flap and took his frying pan and coffeepot out of his grub box and built a fire and started breakfast. It was still cold and misty and the fire felt warm against my face. I heard Lucas behind me.

"Midway up Swan Lake," he said.

I DROVE UP the Blackfoot, through lake country and meadowland and ghost ranches and humped, green foothills, then caught the two-lane highway on the east front of the Mission Mountains and entered the Swan Valley. John Steinbeck once said Montana is a love affair. If a person was going to make his troth with any particular place on earth, I don't think he could find a better one than the stretch of road I was now on. Every bridge crossed a postcard stream, every mountain tumbled into one higher and a deeper green than itself.

Through the pines I saw an enormous, elongated body of blue water glimmering in the sun and I turned off the highway and drove down a shady driveway into a collection of cabins that had been built during the Depression in a stand of birch trees. On the far side of the lake the mountains were thickly wooded with ponderosa and larch and fir, and the only boat on the water was a red canoe from which a man was fly-casting along the bank. Out of the north, a gust of wind blew the length of the lake, wrinkling the surface like old skin, carrying your eye with it to the southern shoreline and, in the distance, the Swan Peaks jutting up over nine thousand feet, gray and steel-colored and snow-packed against the sky.

It wasn't hard to find the Cherokee Jeep Sue Lynn had stolen from the ATF agents. It was parked in a carport attached to the caretaker's cottage, where her cousin lived and took care of the grounds. I knocked on the front door and waited. When no one answered, I walked around back. Sue Lynn had created another prayer garden by placing a circle of stones around a birch tree, with a cross made from strips of red and black cloth that met at the tree trunk. She was sitting on the back steps, in pink tennis shoes and a sleeveless denim shirt and cutoff jeans rolled up high on her thighs. Her face showed no surprise when she saw me.

"Lucas told you where I was?" she asked.

"You'd rather Amos Rackley get to you first?"

"He's not all bad."

"Are you in contact with him?"

"I take whatever help people offer me. I don't have a lot of choices right now."

I sat down on the step below her and removed my hat. A family was grilling sausages on the cement porch of the cottage next door and smoke drifted through the tree limbs overhead.

"You going to let Dr. Voss go down for Lamar Ellison's murder?" I asked.

The surface of the lake shimmered with blades of light.

"Ellison told you something in the tavern the night he died. Something you couldn't deal with," I said.

She paused before she spoke, as though she were about to explain someone's twisted mentality to herself rather than to me. "He said he was sorry about my little brother. His words were, 'I didn't know the kid was gonna get snuffed. I thought they'd turn him loose after a while. There's some real sick guys in the D.C. area, though.'"

I turned around. Her eyes looked like washed coal, bright and hard and filled with injury and an unrelieved anger that would probably never find release. "Ellison kidnapped your little brother?" I said. "He sold him to a deviate. On the East Coast. Him and some others."

"Who?"

"I don't know. Lamar was incoherent. When he finally stopped babbling he didn't know what he'd said."

"You followed him home?" I asked. She rose from the steps and squatted down by the prayer circle and began rolling up the strips of red and black cloth that intersected at the trunk of the birch tree.

"I thought I could find an answer. But there's no answer. I read that book you told me about, Black Elk Speaks. You know the ending. For Indians the Tree of Life is dead," she said.

"You listen to me, Sue Lynn. The right lawyer can get you off. Ellison was a sonofabitch and deserved what he got."

"I'm not going to say any more."

"You have to. Doc's going on trial for what you did."

"Somebody else was there. You leave me alone."

"Say again?"

"A guy was in the shadows. Outside Lamar's house."

"What guy?"

"I didn't stop to chat. But he could have saved Lamar's life and he didn't. Get that look off your face, Mr. Holland. Who hated Lamar as much as I did? Tell Lucas good-bye for me."

"Doc?" I said.

She bundled the strips of black and red cloth under one arm and went inside the cottage and dead-bolted the door behind her.

I USED a pay phone on the highway and called the sheriff at his home.

"Sue Lynn Big Medicine killed Ellison," I said.

"How do you know?"

"I just talked with her. She's hiding out on Swan Lake."

"She confessed to you?"

"Not exactly."

"Here we go again."

"Pick her up, Sheriff. I'll give you the directions."

"It's Sunday. On Monday I'll think about it. In the meantime, try to enjoy life. Give the rest of us a break."

When I got back to Doc's, he and Maisey were raking manure out of the barn and shoveling it into a wheelbarrow and hauling it to a compost heap by his vegetable garden. Doc was bare-chested and sweaty and had tied back his long hair with a blue polka dot bandanna.

I walked out to the horse lot and leaned on the top rail of the fence and watched the two of them work. Maisey kept smiling at me, as though I were being remiss in not helping them. I hated what I was about to say.

"Got something on your mind?" Doc asked.

"Yeah, if you can take a little walk with me," I replied.

"Maisey's a big girl," he said.

"This one's private, Doc."

"We got no secrets here," he said.

"Sue Lynn Big Medicine torched Lamar Ellison. There was a guy outside Ellison's house when she did it," I said.

Doc paused with his hands propped on the inverted end of the rake and gave me a measured stare.

"No kidding?" he said.

"That's what the lady said."

"Maybe that'll help us at the trial," Doc said.

"Could be. Was it you?" I said.

He brushed at his nose and watched a hawk up in a tree not far from Lucas's tent.

"I saw that Witherspoon boy while you were gone. Out yonder in the trees," Doc said.

"Did you turn around on the road and go back to Ellison's place that night?" I asked.

"I guess you got to ask questions like that. Even though they might sorely disappoint an old friend. Well, the answer is-" he said.

But he didn't get to finish his sentence. Maisey threw down her rake in the dust and walked toward me with both her fists clenched, saying to her father, "Don't you answer that question." Then she turned her outrage on me.

"You listen, Billy Bob Holland. Don't you ever question my father's honor. He's your friend, so you by God had better act like it," she said.

I took off my hat and hit a horsefly with it.

"I can understand your sentiments, Maisey," I said.

"No, you don't. No matter how all this turns out, no one is ever going to question this family's integrity again," she said.

I raised my hands.

"You won't hear it from me," I said.

"You got that right," she said, and tossed back her hair and walked to the house.

Doc grinned at me.

"You look a little windblown," he said. "I need to put you on the stand, Doc. That's not a problem, is it?"

"Not for me. What do you reckon Witherspoon was doing around here?" he said.

Later, I asked Lucas to take a walk with me along the water's edge, through the trees, to a pool where you could see the shadows of trout hanging in the current just above the pebbles on the bottom. Under the canopy the ground and boulders and tree trunks were suffused with a cool green light and a tea-colored spring leaked down the lichen into the river.

"Sue Lynn has probably taken off. She wanted me to tell you good-bye," I said.

"Took off where? What for?"

"She killed that biker, Lamar Ellison."

The color drained out of his face. He stopped and picked up a pine cone and flung it at the stream and watched it float down the riffle and disappear under a beaver dam.

"She told you that?" he said.

"More or less."

He kicked at the softness of the ground with his boot. It was one he had worked on oil rigs with, steel-toed, scuffed, laced through metal eyelets with leather thongs. The whites of his eyes were filmed now.

"She didn't leave no note or anything?" he said.

"She's scared. Go easy on her, Lucas. Ellison murdered her little brother."

"Then he had it coming. Why's she letting Doc go down for it?"

I knew words could not lessen his anger or ease his sense of betrayal. Eventually he would forgive Sue Lynn, not at once, not by a conscious choice or arriving at a philosophical moment, but instead one day he would look back through the inverted telescope of time and see her as being possessed of the same moral frailties as himself and hence, in memory, an acceptable part of his life again.

But that day would be a long time coming and these are notions you cannot impart to someone younger than yourself, particularly when the individual is your son.

"What if I take you and Doc and Maisey to the Indian powwow in Arlee?" I said.

"I'm going up to the Swan and find Sue Lynn."

"She's caught air, bud."

He kicked a toadstool into a pulpy spray.

"I'm going to her uncle's and get the dog. I bet she didn't even take the dog," he said.

I walked back to Doc's alone.

I went INTO the barn and took down Doc's ax from between two nails and ripped stumps out of the pasture and weeded Doc's vegetable garden and sprinkled all his flowers and curried his horses and swept the stalls and hauled a truckload of trash down to the dump and buried it with a shovel and generally wore myself out, but I could not think my way out of the problems that seemed to beset me from every direction.

A sun shower was falling on the mountains in the west when I put my shirt back on and went into the barn and hung Doc's ax back on the nails. My skin was filmed with sweat and the wind was cool through the open doors and dust puffed up off the barn floor in my eyes.

At the far end of the barn L.Q. stood against the light, his face lost in silhouette, his coat open and his thumb hooked above the brass cartridges in his gun-belt.

"What are y'all gonna do about that Witherspoon boy?" he said.

"I'd like to cap him and drag the body inside the house. But I've had a bad day and I don't need you to vex me, L.Q."

"If I recall correctly, you told the priest you wasn't gonna gun nobody."

"Maybe I'll have to adjust," I said.

"I'm for it. I'd suggest a ten-gauge loaded with pumpkin balls. Start with Carl Hinkel and Wyatt Dixon and work your way on down. Remember when we caught that bunch coming out of the arroyo outside Zaragoza? They was passing around a bottle of yellow mescal. The first round blew glass right through one fellow's face."

"I stole your life, L.Q."

"I never held it against you. You're still my bud."

"Your words are a crown of thorns," I said. He canted himself sideways and looked at someone behind me, then turned and walked through the barn doors, into the evening and the flicker of lightning on the fields.

"Temple just called. Should I tell her we're on our way to pick her up or you're too busy having a conversation with yourself?" Maisey said.

Early the next morning I drove into town and took Temple for breakfast. On the way back to the motel I saw Terry Witherspoon come out of a medical clinic and get into a battered car by himself and drive away. Temple did not see him.

"I'll drop you off and call you a little later," I said.

"You don't want to come in?" she asked.

"I need to take care of something."

She reached across the seat and ran her fingernail up the back of my neck.

"Secrets have a way of undoing a relationship," she said.

"I think Terry Witherspoon plans to hurt Maisey. Somebody needs to step on this kid's tether," I replied.

She squeezed her thumb and forefinger on my neck, then released the pressure and squeezed again, on and off, and tried to see into the corner of my eye.

"When Dixon and Witherspoon go down, I'm going to be there? Right?" she said.

"You bet," I said.

She leaned forward so I could not avoid looking into her face.

"Don't take what I say lightly," she said. Her milky green eyes held on mine and never blinked. I felt my truck tire hit the curb.

Back at Doc's place I borrowed Maisey's laptop computer and set it up in a sunny spot on a folding table down by the river, fixed a glass of iced tea, and began composing a letter to Wyatt Dixon. It read as follows:

Dear Mr. Dixon,

I interviewed Terry Witberspoon in the Ravalli County Jail after Nicki Molinari's goons dumped him in front of your ranch. Here are a couple of observations I would like to share with you.

It appears Terry has made up a story about my trying to shoot you in the back with a pistol. I don't know if you believe his account or not, but you might ask yourself why an ex-Texas Ranger would try to pop you with a handgun, on your own property, when a man with a scoped.30-06 rifle could punch out your brisket from a mile away.

Terry told me and several others at the jail that you did not have the guts to take on Nicki Molinari because he was Mobbed-up and in Quentin you were a punk for two greaseballs and had run scared of them ever since. He said Molinari already made you look like an ignorant peckerwood in a cafe someplace but you were too stupid to know you had been made a fool of. I'm not sure what he was talking about. He just said Molinari told him rodeo clowns risk their lives for chump change, and that's why only bozos from backwater Southern shit-holes are hired for the job.

In closing I'm obligated to inform you of the following as a matter of social conscience. My associate has accessed Terry's welfare and police and medical records back in North Carolina. It looks like Terry has AIDS. Has he been going for medical treatment here? If I were you, I'd get tested. There are ninety-nine strains of the virus. I suspect Terry has most of them. By the way, conclusive test results take four months.

To be honest, I have a hard time believing anyone who did time in Huntsville and Quentin could be reamed this bad by a box boy whose biggest score was rolling fudge packers. Maybe my perceptions are incorrect. If so, please forgive me.

Have a nice day, Billy Bob Holland

I went back into Missoula and had the letter delivered to the Hinkel compound by a florist, along with a cluster of pink and blue balloons.