James Burke - Bitterroot

"Yes, I know she does," Doc said. "How'd you learn about our trouble?"

"Xavier is friends with the police reporter at the Missoulian," Holly said.

"Seems like Xavier's friend is more loquacious than he should be," Doc said.

There was silence, then Holly Girard said, "Well, should I put this inside?"

Behind me I heard Cleo Lonnigan open the door and step out on the porch. She looked down on the riverbank, then bit the corner of her lip.

"I just burned something on the stove. The odor's terrible. Here, I'll take that inside for you," she said. "Who's our friend with the camera?"

Holly smiled and stepped up on the porch and put the covered dish in Cleo's hands, her face turned at an angle so that it caught the light.

"He's doing a photo essay on the 'Take Back the Night' march at the university. I hope you don't mind him tagging along with me," Holly said.

Doc got up from his chair and put a stick of gum into his mouth. He chewed it, his eyes crinkling at the corners, the way he often did when he chose to ignore what was worst in people.

"Come on in and have some cake," he said.

But Cleo remained in front of the door.

"That man's taking pictures, Doc," she said.

Doc turned and looked down the embankment at the photographer, who had now lowered his camera.

"Is that true, Holly?" Doc asked.

"I didn't know he was going to do that. I'm sorry. If you want the film, you can have it," Holly said.

"I think you should leave," Cleo said.

"Excuse me?" Holly said.

"Bad day for photo-ops. That shouldn't be difficult to understand," Cleo said.

"Does this person speak for you, Tobin?" Holly said.

"Why don't all of you stop talking like I'm not here?" Maisey said.

We all turned and stared at her. She wore no makeup, and her face had the bloodless quality of people who have experienced long illness.

"They did it to me, not you. What right have you all to make decisions about what happens around me? You're treating me like a dumb animal," she said.

In the silence we could hear the wind blowing in the cottonwoods and the water coursing around the exposed boulders in the middle of the river. The photographer rubbed the back of his neck, as though he were massaging an insect bite or waiting for a momentary external problem to pass out of his vision. Then he detached the telescopic lens from his camera, got back into the Jeep, and yawned sleepily, waiting for Holly Girard to join him.

After Holly Girard was gone, I drove down to Bonner and called the sheriff's office.

"You kicked Lamar Ellison loose?" I said.

"At eight o'clock this morning. Right after he ate. He said he couldn't hardly let go of our sausages and hashbrowns," the sheriff replied.

"You think that's funny?"

"You give your damn guff to somebody else. If I had my way, I'd pinch his head off with a log chain."

"Then why don't you do it?"

"Because I don't have victim ID. They put a pillow down on her face. Besides, I don't have bean dip for physical evidence."

"There was DNA in her clothes and on the bed-sheets. They took swabs at the hospital," I said.

The line was quiet.

"Hello?" I said.

"It got sent to the lab… We don't know what happened to it," the sheriff said.

"Say again?"

"You heard me. I'm coming out there to explain all this to Dr. Voss."

I could feel my hand opening and closing on the phone receiver, my chest rising and falling.

"These bikers, the Berdoo Jesters? Cleo Lonnigan says they may have been involved in her son's murder," I said.

"That's what she believes. I like Cleo, but the truth is her husband washed money for the Mob. Maybe she don't like to admit where her wealth comes from. There might even be a mean side to Cleo you don't know about," the sheriff said, and hung up.

I called him back, my hand shaking when I punched in the numbers.

"Rapists who get away with it come back. They increase their power by tormenting the victim," I said.

"Take Dr. Voss and his daughter back to Texas. Let us handle it," he replied.

My ass, I thought.

The first call came the next day. I happened to answer it. In the background I could hear people laughing and a motorcycle engine revving.

"Is this the doctor?" the voice said.

"Who's calling?"

"Thought you might want to know she'd already lost her cherry. So don't make out it's a bigger deal than it was," the voice said.

"What's your name, partner?"

"I just wanted to tell the pill roller his daughter gives good head. I've had better, but she's got promise. If I get horny, I might give her another tumble. Have a nice day."

"You're not a smart man."

The line went dead.

I went into the living room. Doc was rubbing oil into a pair of lace-top boots by the fireplace.

"Who was that?" he asked.

"One of those motorcycle boys."

He rubbed another layer of oil on a boot and turned the boot over in his hands and looked at it.

"You reckon they'll be back around?" he said.

"If they think they can blindside you," I replied.

He wiped the excess oil off his boots with a rag and looked idly out the window, his thoughts masked.

I SPLIT WOOD on a chopping stump in back. The morning had grown warm and I was sweating inside my clothes. It had snowed up high during the night and the newly fallen snow was melting in the trees on the ridges, and there was a dark sheen on the pine and fir needles. I whipped the ax through the air and felt it rip cleanly through a chunk of dry larch. The ax handle was solid and hard inside my hands, and in minutes the ground around the stump was littered with white strips of kindling.

I held the ax blade flat against the stump with my knee and filed it sharp, then attacked another pile of wood.

My head was singing with blood, my palms tingling. I thought I saw L.Q. Navarro up on the edge of the tree line, his coat hitched back of his revolver, and I knew what was really on my mind.

The adrenaline rush that came with the smell of gunpowder and horse sweat during our raids down into Coahuila had the same residual claim on my soul that heroin has on an intravenous addict's. In my sleep I desired it in almost a sexual fashion. It drove me to the grace and loveliness of women's thighs. It made me yearn for absolution and kept me in the Catholic confessional. It made me sometimes sit in the darkness with L.Q.'s blue-black custom-made.45, its yellowed ivory grips like moonlight between my fingers.

I went into the house and showered inside the tin stall and kept my head under the hot water for a long time. There was an old bullet wound, like a putty-colored welted star, on top of my foot, and another on my arm and another on my chest, two inches above the lung. I never associated them with pain, because I had felt only numbness when I was hit.

In fact, the memories they caused in me had never given me trepidation about mortality. Instead, they reminded me of a potential in myself I did not wish to recognize.

I started to comb my hair, but Maisey's robe hung over the only mirror in the room. I removed it and put it on a clothes hanger and hooked the hanger on top of the closet door. The robe was pink and covered with depictions of kittens playing with balls of string. I tried to imagine what Doc was feeling, but I don't believe that anyone could, not unless he has looked into his daughter's eyes after she has been systematically degraded by subhumans whose level of cruelty is in direct measure to their level of cowardice.

My hair was reddish-blond, like my father's, but there were strands of white in it now, and neither time nor experience had taught me how to deal with the violent legacy that my great-grandfather, Sam Morgan Holland, a besotted drover and gunfighter and Baptist preacher, had bequeathed his descendants.