James Burke - Bitterroot

I had admonished and cautioned Doc, but in truth I felt Maisey's attackers were born for a cottonwood tree.

I DRESSED in fresh clothes and slipped on my boots and went back into the living room. Doc was scraping the ashes out of the fireplace with a small metal scoop and dropping them into a bucket that he covered with a lid each time the ashes puffed into the air.

"The older you get, the more you look like your dad. He was a good-looking fellow, wasn't he?" Doc said.

"Family trait," I said.

He wiped soot off his face with his sleeve and grinned. He waited for me to speak again, reading my expression with more perception than made me comfortable.

"I thought I might go into town," I said.

"What for?"

I cleared my throat slightly.

"If Cleo's not at the clinic, I thought I might invite her to lunch," I said.

"You took her to the rodeo, didn't you?"

"I guess I did."

"You want some advice? Most of us have fond memories of first love because it was innocent and we didn't exploit it to solve our problems. Later on we use romance like dope. Headstones don't keep people in the grave and neither does getting laid," he replied. He turned his back on me and scraped a load of black ash from the firestones and dropped it into the bucket.

"That's a little bit strong, Doc."

I thought he would turn around and grin again and perhaps indicate some form of apology.

But he didn't.

When I drove into the Jocko Valley the meadows and hillsides were covered with sunlight, but the sky in the north had turned the color of scorched tin, and I could see lightning pulsing in the clouds above the ridgeline.

Just as I turned off the main road I glanced in the rearview mirror and saw a low-slung red car behind me, one that was coming too fast, drifting across the center line, as though the driver were bothered by the fact there was an obstruction in his path. I remembered having seen, or rather heard, the same car earlier back in Missoula, when the driver had roared onto the 1-90 entrance ramp. The car didn't turn with me and instead kept going on the main road. A woman in the passenger's seat looked back at me blankly, her hair whipping across her mouth.

I drove through the gated entrance to Cleo's place and stopped by the barn. A bare-chested carpenter, who had the suntanned good looks of a Nordic sailor, was working on the roof. He told me Cleo was not home, that she was with some of her patients.

"At the clinic?" I said.

He slipped his hammer into a loop on his belt and spread his knees on the spine of the roof and pointed to a dirt road that disappeared into trees on an adjoining hill.

"She makes house calls. You'll know when you're there," he said.

"How's that?" I said.

"Some people take care of stray cats. Cleo's special, the best damn woman in these parts, buddy," he replied, almost like a challenge.

I drove back out the gate and up the dirt road into the shade of the trees. Halfway up the hill I saw an unpainted house back in a clearing and Cleo's skinned-up truck parked in the yard.

The yard was littered with flattened beer cans, chicken feathers that had blown from a butcher stump, washing machine and car parts, even a toilet bowl that lay incongruously on its side by an outdoor privy. A trash fire was burning in back of the house, and the wind blew the smoke through the back windows and out the open front door. I stepped up on the porch and saw Cleo in the kitchen, spooning oatmeal out of a pan to three small Indian children at the table.

"Hello?" I said, and tapped on the jamb.

She brushed a strand of hair out of her eyes with the back of her wrist and looked at me through the gloom.

"How'd you know where I was?" she asked.

"Your carpenter."

But she was preoccupied with her work and was not looking at me now.

"Okay, you guys wash your dishes when you're finished," she said to the children. "Can you do that? Your grandmother is going to be here soon. My friend and I are going to wait outside. What are we doing Saturday?"

"Going to the movies!" the children shouted together.

A moment later Cleo and I walked out into the yard. The sun was gone, and a heavy, gray mist was moving across the trees at the top of the mountain and raindrops were striking like wet stars on the dirt in the clearing.

"Their mother is nineteen. Nineteen, with three kids. She's in the Missoula jail right now. She gave up glue sniffing for the joys of crystal meth," Cleo said.

"How long has it been out here?" I asked.

"Three years, maybe. The California gangs brought it into Seattle and Spokane, then it was everywhere."

My eyes drifted to her mouth, the mole on her chin, the way the wind blew her hair on her cheek. A middle-aged Indian woman driving a rusted junker that had no glass in the front windows pulled into the yard and went into the house. She nodded at Cleo but ignored me.

"That's the grandmother?" I asked.

"There's a likelihood she'll be a great-grandmother at fifty," Cleo said.

"Take a ride with me," I said.

"Where to?"

"Anyplace you want to go."

She looked at me for a long moment.

"You a serious man, Billy Bob?" she asked.

"You can always run me off."

She looked at the torn shreds of cloud swirling just above the tops of the trees and said, "I'll leave my truck at the clinic. I have to be back there by three."

I opened her truck door for her. When I closed it, my fingers touched the top of her hand.

"Your carpenter says you're special," I said.

Her eyes seemed to reach inside mine, as they had once before, probing for the secret thought, the personal agenda.

"Eric's gay. That's why he speaks so generously about women," she said.

"My grandpa used to say outcasts and people of color are always a white person's best measure," I replied.

"I think you and Doc really belong here," she said.

We dropped her truck off at the clinic, then drove in the rain toward a cafe farther up the Jocko that sold buffalo burgers and huckleberry milkshakes. I pulled into a gas station and parked next to a row of sheltered pumps and stuck the gas hose into the tank. Then I saw a low-slung red car at the next gas island and an Indian girl with blond streaks in her hair standing by the back fender while the hose pumped gas into her tank.

She saw me watching her and turned her back and lit a cigarette.

"You got a suicide wish?" I said.

"No, you do, dickhead. Get out of here," she said.

"You're on the job?"

Her face grew heated, her lips crimped tightly together. She ripped the gas nozzle out of the tank and clanked it back on the pump.

Then a red-haired, lantern-jawed man in a yellow slicker and an Australian flop hat pushed open the glass door of the convenience store and walked toward us in the rain, an idiot's grin on his mouth.

"Bless your heart, I been thinking about you all day and you pull right in to the gas pump," Wyatt Dixon said.

"He was coming on to me, Wyatt," the girl said.

"Sue Lynn, Mr. Holland is a lawyer and a respecter of womanhood and a Texas gentleman. My sister, Katie Jo Winset, the one in the graveyard? She said he always removes his hat in the house and he don't never walk around with spit cups, either," Dixon said.

"Did you follow me up to Montana?" I said.

"I'm a rodeo man, sir. Calgary to Madison Square Garden to San Angelo. Can you step over here with me?"

I started back toward my truck. But he situated himself in my path, the taut, grained skin of his face beaded with raindrops. His shirt was unbuttoned to the navel under his slicker, and I could smell the dampness on his body, like the odor of drainwater welling out of an iron grate. Behind him a stump fire was smoking in the mist.

"At night, in a jailhouse, when you hear somebody scream? The kind of scream that's different from any other you ever heard? You know Lamar or one like him has just speared a new fish. Jailing ain't like it was in the old days, Mr. Holland. Folks ain't raising criminals like they used to," Dixon said.