Every Cloak Rolled in Blood

Chapter Thirty-One

Ruby is headed up Lolo Pass, where a fire has burned down a church and jumped the highway and is climbing up the side of Lolo Peak. The rain that should have impeded the flames has been undone by the velocity of the wind. Crown fires, the kind that leap across the canopy of the forest, cannot be outrun by people on foot. The years 2020 and early 2021 have produced record droughts. I think we’re in for it.

I get a sleeping bag from the closet and open it up like a blanket, lie down on the couch with a pillow under my head and Grandfather’s Peacemaker under the pillow, and pull the sleeping bag up to my chin. Why choose the heavy single-action revolver for self-protection rather than weapons in my possession that are far more sophisticated? The Peacemaker is part of the man and the times in which he carried it as a Texas Ranger and town marshal. From Reconstruction to the Dust Bowl, Grandfather went up against some of the most dangerous gunfighters in Texas, including Harvey Logan, a member of the Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.

In early 1934 Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow and Raymond Hamilton and his girlfriend camped on Grandfather’s ranch during a dust storm so thick the dust piled to the bottom of the windmill blades; Grandfather had to nail wet burlap over the windows. My cousin Weldon Holland fell in love with Bonnie and said she was nothing like the woman smoking a cigar with her foot on the bumper of a stolen car. I loved the stories that Weldon and Grandfather told me, and I ached to have been born in that era.

Grandfather did not abide complexity. When asked the secret of his survival in over a dozen gun duels, he said, “Take your time and don’t miss.” He had no formal education but owned a set of encyclopedias he read from cover to cover over the course of his life. He and Weldon put a wreath on Bonnie’s grave. Grandfather’s axiom was “Love the Lord and love the world and don’t let anybody tell you one is exclusive of the other.”

So that’s why I pick up Grandfather’s Peacemaker. I feel its weight and heft and coldness and know that I’m carrying a tradition that has few equals. It’s a pretty good way to feel. Or at least that’s what I tell myself.

The rain is coming down steadily, snow sliding down the windows, electricity veining in the clouds. I do not want to think about the apparition of Major Baker and his men and their captive in the trees. In fact, I tell myself the sun will rise in the morning, the fires will die in the mountains, the fish will leap in the streams, and the earth will in some way be mended.

It’s after midnight now. I know that somehow I missed something about the logic of Ginny Stokes’s statement regarding Jack Wetzel’s theft of the bow and quiver and her directive for its return. Yes, under reasonable circumstances Jack should have gone to the Culpepper home and apologized. But Leigh is not at the home. He is probably somewhere up one of the creeks in the Bitterroot Mountains. Jack Wetzel, a drug mule who hates and fears authority, will have to deal on his own with John Culpepper, a former Klansman who for thirty years has probably sought out a scapegoat or a villain he could punish for the Black child he murdered in Alabama.

I sit on the side of my couch and rub my face. The sky is still black and the rain still falling, like a curtain protecting me from the world. I want to fix a sandwich and a glass of milk and go back to sleep. I despise the idea of what I have to do.

I go in the kitchen and turn on the light and call John Culpepper. Perhaps fifteen rings go by. My conscience is almost home free and I start to hang up. Then I hear him clearing his throat. “Who the hell is this?”

“I’m sorry to call so late, Mr. Culpepper. It’s about your boy and Jack Wetzel.”

“Time for you to mind your own business, Mr. Broussard.”

“Sir, this is very important. If you’ll give me a minute or two—”

“What I’ll give you is hell. Don’t ring my phone and don’t darken my door. I cain’t tell you how I strongly I feel about this.”

“Yes, sir,” I say. “I shouldn’t have called. I won’t do it again.”

He hangs up.

I cannot be certain of the events that followed. Perhaps that is the way of most tragedies. It’s grand to think of our denouement in terms of a five-act Elizabethan drama, but it seems that happenstance often holds more sway than the rules of Aristotle’s Poetics. Age cheats us in a peculiar fashion; it does not come with wisdom. I wanted to undo my youthful mistakes by reforming Jack Wetzel and helping Leigh Culpepper and his father lead lives that education and poverty had denied them. My best efforts came to nothing. However, I’ll let the reader judge. Perhaps indeed the weights on the scale get balanced and in the fifth act a semblance of catharsis and order is imposed upon the players and we continue our lives and do our best until the day comes when we have to go either gentle or raging into that good night. I suspect the real issue is how we conduct ourselves when the ironies of fate seem more than the soul can bear.

The television and newspaper accounts about John Culpepper and Leigh and Jack were fragmented and probably made little sense to an outside observer. But someone with any knowledge of the damaged lives they had been dealt would understand how a kingdom can be lost for want of a nail.

Jack or his mother had bought a gas-guzzler, but Leigh had no money for a vehicle and had run away from home and encamped in an overhang up in the Bitterroots. Pretending to follow his mother’s order, Jack put the bow and quiver of arrows in the backseat of the gas-guzzler and drove toward the Culpepper house. Once out of sight, he switched direction and headed south for Blodgett Canyon, west of Hamilton, and walked two miles soaking wet into the wilderness to wake his friend in an overhang and ask him to deliver the quiver and bow to John Culpepper, whose wrath he feared.

Just before sunrise, Leigh dropped Jack at a truck stop and drove to his home on the back road not far from my ranch. Evidently John Culpepper had seen the gas-guzzler on several occasions and had never seen anyone other than Jack drive it.

The weapon he used was probably under his bed and already loaded. It was an AR-15, the civilian equivalent of the M-16, but unlike the latter, it never jammed. When the sheriff’s deputies arrived, Culpepper was hardly intelligible. The AR-15 was in a puddle of water in the middle of the yard. Culpepper’s wife, who was screaming on the porch, had raked her husband’s face with her fingernails and had to be sedated and taken away in an ambulance.

Culpepper told the deputies he heard a vehicle with a broken muffler coming up the back road, then saw it turn into the yard, its headlights on high beam, the windshield wipers slashing across the glass. The driver cut the engine and headlights and stepped into the yard, then removed an archer’s bow from the backseat. Culpepper added that he was sure Wetzel was there to do bodily harm to his family.

The driver was wearing a hooded raincoat. The bow was in his left hand, as though he were about to nock an arrow on the string. Culpepper raised the AR-15 and began firing. He said he did not remember how many times he pulled the trigger. A deputy picked up nine spent cartridges from the porch and flower bed. At least three rounds struck the driver. The driver was identified as Leigh Beauvoir Culpepper. He died in the ambulance en route to the hospital in Missoula, just as the sun was rising above Mount Sentinel, at the bottom of which was the vocational college Leigh Culpepper had attended.

John Culpepper was taken to jail for his own protection, according to a Ravalli County Sheriff’s Department press release, then allowed to return home with his wife three hours later.

At two-fifteen p.m. the same day, I get another call from Ginny Stokes. “You’ve heard all about it?” she says.

“The shooting?”

“What do you think? Has Jack contacted you?”

“Why would he call me?”

“He’s in trouble. I’m the one who forced him into the situation. That mean I’m the stink on shit.”

Through the window I can see Lolo Peak and columns of smoke in the rain. “If Jack calls, what do you want me to tell him?”

“To get out of town.”

“He didn’t do anything wrong,” I reply.

“Culpepper will blame him for everything that’s happened. He’ll probably blame you and me, too.”

“Goodbye, Sister.”

“Don’t hang up on me. I’ll come over there and rip your ass out of its socket.”

I hang up and call my wrangler friend who watches the house, and arm the security system and put on my old Stetson and canvas coat and drop Grandfather’s Peacemaker in the right pocket, and leave the house before Sister Ginny can call back or block my driveway.

I do not know where Jimmie the Digger lives. But his kind is not hard to find. Wherever the dependent and vulnerable are, wherever there is corruption or cops on a pad or a government that inculcates in the electorate vices like lotteries and casinos and a shuck like the harmlessness of weed, Jimmie the Digger will be there, too.

I drive up Evaro Hill and onto the res and stop at the nightclub close by the spot where Clayton Wetzel’s body was torn into pieces. The same bartender is there, wearing pigtails and a silver-and-gold rodeo rider’s belt buckle. There are few people in the bar. “Me again,” I say.

He leans on his arms, his chest the size of a rain barrel. “How you doin’, Mr. Broussard. What can I serve you?”

“Know a character named Jimmie Kale? Aka Jimmie the Digger. Has an adenoidal accent, kind of like a parrot or Willie Nelson.”

“Do I know him personally? No, I don’t.”

“But you know who he is?”

“Yeah.” He looks at the tops of his hands.

“You don’t feel comfortable talking about him?”

“I don’t need guys like that coming around.”

“I understand,” I say.

“It’s meth and opioids. They’re all over the place. It’s not just the kids. It’s the whole family. Custer would love it.”

“Where can I find Kale?”

“I hear he’s got a fuck pad up the Jocko. You’ll see some cottages by the bridge. Take a right and keep going up the river.”

“Can I buy you a drink?”

He puts a toothpick in his mouth and rolls it across his teeth. “Me and some others run a program for teenage addicts. When you’ve got time, you might make a contribution.”

“Maybe so.”

He flips the toothpick into the trash can. “About Kale? Watch yourself, Mr. Broussard. I’ve heard stories about him I don’t want to think about.”

I head up the highway. The Jocko Valley is feed-grower country, and the fields are sodden and green and smoky from the rain and the spot fires ignited by lightning. The highway dips down to a bridge on the far side of the river. I turn and pass some rental cottages under birch trees and drive up a slope toward the Mission Mountains.

I have no plan, at least no conscious one. However, I know in one way or another I’ve already cast the die. I cannot continue to live the way I have lived since my daughter’s death. Psychoneurotic anxiety and agitated depression coupled with an ideational personality produce a combination that is like being boiled alive.

In part I know that the choice is not entirely mine. Major Eugene Baker is back in town and obviously for a reason. Jeremiah McNally has committed suicide; Leigh Culpepper has been shot to death by his father; and John Culpepper, after shooting his son multiple times, claiming self-defense and misidentification of the victim, has been released by the authorities. In the center of all these events are people like Jimmie Kale, spreading an addiction that is arguably genocidal.

I rumble across a bridge and see a white cottage with a green alpine metal roof and flowers planted in a line of coffee cans on the front porch. Kale’s Caddy is parked in the dirt drive, brown maple leaves pasted like spiders on the starched-white top. The wind is out of the north, swirling off the Missions, the sun buried like a dull silver coin in the clouds, some of the flower cans rolling back and forth on the porch.

My black Stetson is blown off my head as soon as I step out of my car. It bounces end over end into the Jocko. I beat on the door and make as much noise as I can. Kale opens the door in a purple suit and shined cowboy boots and a black shirt with tiny pink roses printed on it. “You trying to tear my house down?” he says.

“See the news?”

“No, and I’m not interested, either.”

“John Culpepper shot and killed his son by mistake. He mistook him in the dark for Jack Wetzel. I thought Jack might be headed your way. He doesn’t have many friends right now.”

“Number one, I don’t know John Culpepper from monkey jism. Number two, Jack Wetzel is a walking promotion for the pro-choice movement, and number three, who told you where I live?” Over his shoulder I can see a tall young Indian woman in the kitchen. She is wearing tight shorts and cowboy boots that look brand-new and a T-shirt that reads “Love It or Give It Back.”

Kale follows my line of vision. “What?” he says.

“I’d call you white trash, Kale, but you don’t make the bar. You’re a disease, like the Black Plague in the fourteenth century. You know the children’s rhyme ‘Ring around the rosie... all fall down’? The roses were the black sores that spread all over people’s bodies when the plague passed through their town. That’s you, Kale. You come to town and people die, and in the meantime you get your ashes hauled wherever you can.”

The woman in the kitchen had been cooking eggs and sausages, stirring them with a spatula. But now the spatula is barely moving as she listens to our conversation.

Kale looks over his shoulder again, then back at me. “People got a false impression of me. I’ve done a lot of good around here. Things maybe you don’t know about.” He waits for me to reply. But I don’t. “Why you looking at me like that?” he says.

“I heard you were cruel to animals.”

“Then you heard wrong.” His eyes follow my right hand. “What are you doin’?”

“I think you help people like Eugene Baker and Phil Sheridan and John Chivington.”

“I don’t know anything about these people. You got some kind of brain tumor?”

“Sheridan said, ‘The only good Indian I ever saw was dead.’ Chivington said, ‘Nits make lice.’ You have any firearms here?”

“What if I do?” he replies.

“I’m glad you feel that way. I’ll be outside a few minutes. Some people believe you’re already dead. I think that might be true.”

“I think you’re fucking out of your mind. If I didn’t have company—”

“I’m glad you mentioned the lady in the kitchen. I think she should leave.”

The Indian woman turns off the burners on the stove as though in slow motion and, in the same fashion, picks up the skillet with a hot pad and takes it and the spatula to the sink and rinses them with cold water, then turns off the faucet and stares out the window at the rain misting on the meadows.

“Miss, did you hear me?” I say.

“Yes,” she answers.

“None of this is your fault.”

She nods, then puts on her coat and goes out the back door. I look at Kale. “I’ll be outside,” I say.

I go out on the porch and pull the Peacemaker from my pocket and aim at the Cadillac’s grille with both hands, arms extended straight out. I fire into the grille with the first round and put the second round through the hood and the firewall and dashboard. Then I hear Kale behind me. I turn just as he swings a baseball bat across my back, knocking me sideways off the porch into the mist, Grandfather’s Peacemaker flying from my hand.

“You thought I was some kind of douchebag out of one of your fucking books? You were gonna ruin my car, run off my gash, get me to beg, make me your punk?”

I try to stand, but he swings the bat into my arm and flattens me in the mud, then kicks me in the back of the head. “You didn’t answer me.”

“Bugger off, Kale.”

He gnarls the tip of the bat into my neck and keeps his foot on my chest. “How do you want it? I can start with your shins. They break like sticks. Or I can take your head off with one swack. Your choice.”

My head is swimming, as though something has pulled loose inside it. He kicks me in the face. “Want some more?”

“You know your problem, Kale? You’re you. That won’t ever change. You were unwanted in the womb. When you’re in the ground, no one will take the time to piss on your grave. How does it feel?”