Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Ten

At the kitchen table in the light of day, I put on rubber gloves and unload the Uzi and the chrome job, a .40-caliber Smith & Wesson, and shake the contents from the boys’ wallets. Both boys have Idaho driver’s licenses. The older boy is Clayton Wetzel. The younger is Jack Wetzel. Jack has a Missoula library card. Clayton carries a condom. Their wallets contain a total of thirty-seven dollars. Their names don’t show up on Google or Facebook.

I put their tape and hammer in one reinforced plain paper bag and their weapons in another. Today is still Wednesday, and I do nothing of consequence until sunset, then dig a hole behind my barn and bury the boys’ wallets and the bullets from their weapons and drive to the main post office in Missoula and park in front. Because of the pandemic, few people wish to enter the building and instead use the drive-by boxes to mail their letters. I put on a mask and my rubber gloves and wait until the building is empty, then walk through the glass doors to the parcel drop, pull the handle, and slide the paper bags inside. They make a clunking sound when they hit the bottom of the receptacle.

Sunday morning I put on a gray suit and dress shirt and bolo tie and a six-X black Stetson and a pair of pointy-toed, spit-shined oxblood Tony Lama boots, and I drive twenty-three miles straight south into the heart of the Bitterroot Valley and the town (population eight hundred) of Victor, Montana. Other than the motorized vehicles and the electrification of the structures, the town could have been teleported from the year 1875. The streets are lined with trees, the mountains immediately west of town massive, stretched across the sky; they seem to tumble into the tiny backyards of the neighborhood.

Not far from the center of the town is a small white church called the New Gospel Tabernacle. It has a faux bell tower and the soft, immaculate color and lines of a freshly iced wedding cake. There is a glassed-in welcome and information sign by the front entrance. Services are at seven p.m. Wednesdays and ten a.m. Sundays. The pastor is Sister Ginny Stokes.

The sun is straight up in the sky when I arrive. A row of shiny motorcycles is parked on the side lawn. A tarp suspended on poles ripples and pops above a table covered with a checkered cloth and piles of food; smoke leaks from the closed lid of a barbecue grill. No one wears masks. The men’s beards are the size of shovels; they have hair like Mongolian warriors and chests like beer kegs. Their hands are rocks. They’re hobnailed, strung with ornamental chains and stomp-ass tats, and wear leather or denim stiff with dirt and grease. Most of the rockers on the back of their vests suggest visions of either hell, the devil, or primitive tribes who were dedicated to tearing down civilization stone by stone.

One of their favorite songs is Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother,” with an emphasis on the phrase “kicking hippies’ asses.” Their vocal cords sound chemically fried or soaked in Drano. To them, misogyny is a given and accepted as such by an inexplicable strain of women who, of their own volition, will cling to the back of a sociopath at eighty miles an hour without a helmet, knees spread around his hips, hair whipping them blind. The greatest virtue of outlaw bikers is their ferocity in a gang fight. Even when they lose, they eat their pain and glow with a bloody aura and refuse to dime the people who put them in a hospital.

I put on a mask before I get out of my truck. Leigh Culpepper is tuning an electric cherry guitar on a wood stage, the feedback screeching through a loudspeaker. His father stands next to him, a Japanese acoustic hanging from his neck; he and his son are dressed in hundred-dollar lavender suits, their neckties crusted with sequins.

Virginia Stokes comes from the back of the church with a ham on a tray. She sets the tray on a buffet table and begins slicing the ham, one eye on me, ignoring two bikers who are telling her a joke of some kind. She’s wearing Santa Claus boots with bells and designer jeans and a light mackinaw. Her hair is spread on her shoulders and looks attractive.

I take off my hat to her and put it back on. She stops cutting and puts down her butcher knife and meat fork and wipes her hands with a towel, her eyes locked on mine. The two bikers follow her line of vision and stop talking. One has a gray beard, fluffy like Spanish moss and streaked with red, the other a face like a hatchet, a Stars and Bars kerchief twisted into a rope and tied tightly around his head.

Then I hear Fannie Mae’s voice in the wind: Don’t let these guys write the script, Pops. Get on it.

How? I respond in my head.

Do what they don’t expect.

The sun has tilted toward the west. I walk toward the serving table, the brim of my hat pulled down to keep the glare out of my eyes. “How do you do, Ms. Stokes?”

“It’s Sister Ginny,” she says.

“You have a real nice building here.”

“It’s a church, not a building,” she says. “What do you want?”

“I thought I’d catch your sermon.”

“That’s why you arrived after it was over?”

“Maybe I can come back on Wednesday night.”

“Is this guy causing a problem, Sister?” the bearded man asks.

Her eyes take me apart. “No,” she says.

“How much for the buffet?” I ask.

“I didn’t hear anyone invite you,” she says.

The tarp is flapping overhead in the quiet. The mountains are blue and deep green and wrapped with black shadow and long stretches of thickly wooded forests on the slopes.

“It’s fifteen dollars,” she says. “There’s a tin box on the table.”

“Can I talk with you?” I ask.

She rubs her hands as though she’s putting lotion on them. “I’ll think about it.”

I pay for the meal and go through the line and fill a plate with slaw and beans and potato salad. An elderly woman in wool slacks pours a cup of Kool-Aid for me. “You’re not going to have any barbecue?” she says.

“Have to watch my cholesterol.”

“Sister Ginny keeps it lean for us seniors. Where might you be from?”

“Up toward Lolo.”

“Well, it’s nice to know you and to see you here. We hope you come back.”

“You, too, ma’am,” I say.

It’s obvious she’s a kindly lady, and being in her late seventies, she’s very vulnerable to the virus. Why is she with a bunch like this?

“Ma’am?” I say.

“Yes, sir?”

She waits, her blue eyes glassy with cataracts, her face seamed with harsh winters, maybe up on the Highline, where Canadian storms leave both livestock and wild animals clanking with strings of ice.

“This is the best Kool-Aid I’ve ever had,” I say.

It’s warm in the sunshine, and I sit by myself at a plank table and listen to the Culpeppers and three women play country and bluegrass spirituals. My favorite is “I’m Using My Bible for a Roadmap.” John Culpepper plays mandolin and banjo as well as guitar and has a fine voice. After a half hour, someone shouts out, “Johnny B. Goode!” Others start yelling, too.

“Cain’t do it,” Culpepper says into the microphone.

“Hell yes, you can!” someone yells.

“It’s Sunday,” Culpepper says.

“Not in Afghanistan,” someone else yells. “Play it for them boys over there!”

Everyone laughs and claps. “I guess that won’t hurt nothing, will it?” Culpepper says into the mike, looking at Virginia Stokes. She smiles approvingly.

He borrows his son’s electric guitar and kicks it off in a barre C major way up on the neck, then does some magic on the treble strings with F and G7th the way Chuck Berry did, sliding his fingers down the frets into a conventional C chord, suddenly bridging into a driving four-four beat that has the crowd going wild.

I wonder if I have misjudged the congregants or been too hard on them. Minutes earlier the Culpeppers and their friends were singing and playing the songs of Ralph Stanley and Don Reno and Red Smiley with the same level of skill, the same nineteenth-century Appalachian purity, the same serenity in their faces. Now a former Klansman is paying tribute to a Black man who was the most influential musician in the history of rock and roll. I want to stand up and clap with the others, but I don’t. Why? Because I remember the years of distrust, growing up in the South, and the disappointment I felt when I convinced myself that the adoration of the Lost Cause was gone, and that the valor of the boys in butternut somehow undid or at least ameliorated the sin of slavery. Even today I want those things to be true, and I cannot watch footage of the mob flinging ropes on Lee’s statue and in seconds reducing it to rubble.

Culpepper goes into Berry’s duckwalk across the stage. It’s as good a representation and as funny as Michael J. Fox’s in Back to the Future. Then someone throws a plastic Obama mask on the stage, and Culpepper scoops it up and puts it on and continues his duckwalk, except the innocence is up the spout and the hilarity of the crowd is of a different kind — atavistic, raw, their faces gleeful and vindictive as if they’re drunk, a fecal shine in their eyes.

I get up to go. Then a hand settles on my shoulder. I look up at the face of Sister Ginny Stokes. “You still want to talk?” she says.

I follow her into the building. The hallway is painted from floor to ceiling with a portrayal of Yahweh raging above the red and black flames of an inferno. In gilded letters at the top of one wall are the words “The Wrath of God.”

“Like it?” she says.

“Who painted it?”

“Me.”

“You’re pretty good,” I say.

She pushes open a door. “This is my office. Sit down. Don’t give me any bullshit, either.”

The office is small, the desk made of metal, a solitary bookshelf above it. Among the titles are Little House on the Prairie and My Ántonia. There is a glass jar full of candy balls on the corner of her desk. I sit on a hard chair. Hers is a swivel, padded with leather.

“I had a visit in the early a.m. Wednesday from two kids named Wetzel,” I say.

“Yeah?”

“They seemed to know you.”

“Well, I don’t know them.”

“I think they came to pull my plug.”

“You think?” she says.

“They’re from Idaho. I hear you did a five-bit there.”

Her eyes contain no emotion, no sign of injury or even thought. “You fuck around?”

“Pardon?”

“You heard me.”

“I cut those kids loose, Sister Ginny. That means I put potentially dangerous people on the street.”

“You don’t like to talk about fucking?”

“I think I’d better go.”

She twists the swivel chair back and forth. “Got you off guard? Hang around. Maybe we’ll take a drive somewhere. Have a few drinks. Afraid I’m going to shake your peaches?”

I get up to go. “You’ve got a lot of artistic talent, Miss Ginny. So does Mr. Culpepper. Why waste it running a hate group?”

She unscrews the lid on the glass jar and puts a candy ball in her mouth. “Want one?”

“No, thank you.”

“Google says you’re worth sixty million dollars.”

“Writers like me don’t make that kind of money.”

She takes a book from the shelf on the wall. It’s a hardback copy of my most recent novel. “You do all the shit that’s in here?”

“The character defects are mine. The rest is fiction.”

“Want to sign it?”

She pushes it toward me, her face whimsical, her eyes peeling off my skin. I write on the title page and tuck the flap into the page and close the cover and hand the book back to her. She opens it and reads the inscription. “ ‘To a lady who does it her way’?” she says. “What the fuck does that mean?”

“You don’t take prisoners.”

“Got a question for you. You turned your back on me the other day.”

“Yes, I did.”

“Where do you get off with that?”

“You scared the hell out of me.”

She rolls the candy ball around in her mouth, letting it click against her teeth, then writes a phone number on a scrap of paper and gives it to me. “Don’t treat this in a casual way. I don’t make the invitation to just anybody. Get my drift, sweetcakes?”

She cracks the candy ball with her molars.