James Burke - Bitterroot

Hinkel emerged from a small stone hut off to the side of the main house, wearing a navy blue shirt and white suspenders and corduroy trousers. He eyed me carefully, smoke leaking from around the stem of the corncob pipe clenched in his mouth. He waved the two men away.

"You were at the rodeo. You have a history with Wyatt," he said.

"I'd like to talk with you about him, Mr. Hinkel. Or, more specifically, about a man named Lamar Ellison," I said.

"Wyatt says you were a Texas Ranger."

"Among other things."

"A Ranger?" he said reflectively. "Well, we'll just have to ask you in, sir."

I followed him into the hut, stooping slightly under the doorway's wood casement. The desk and tables and shelves inside were stacked with clutter. The monitor on his computer bathed the stone walls with a green light. He clicked off the screen so I could not read what was on it.

On the wall were pictures of Douglas MacArthur, A. P. Hill, and the founder of the American Nazi Party, George Lincoln Rockwell. There was also a youthful photograph of Carl Hinkel in uniform.

"You were in the airborne, Mr. Hinkel?" I said.

His eyes had a peculiar cast in them. They seemed to look at me in a mirthful way, and at the same time analyze each word I had just spoken.

"You asked about this man Ellison. He's been here. But not recently. He won't be back, either," he said, ignoring my question about his military background.

His accent was Tidewater, the r's almost like w's. He sat erectly in his chair at his desk, his entire posture one of ninety-degree angles.

"Ellison is no longer welcome?" I said, and tried to smile.

"I have nothing to say about him."

"Wyatt Dixon offered to kill him for two thousand dollars. That's bargain basement. I have the feeling Wyatt was trying to pick up two grand on a done deal."

"You're offensive, sir."

"Excuse me?"

"I don't share your frame of reference. You presume that I do."

I placed my elbow on his desk and leaned toward him and said, "Psychopaths like Lamar Ellison and Wyatt Dixon and the men who bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City? They all seek validation from male authority figures, fraudulent patriarchs who manipulate them for their own ends. They come to you like rats down a mooring rope, Mr. Hinkel."

He looked at me for a long time, his eyelids never blinking.

"You came here to sow discord and violence between two troubled young men," he said. "You use the methods of ZOG well. You may be a gentile but the yellow star is on your brow."

The evening of the next day Doc took Maisey to a movie in Missoula. I called Cleo and asked her to supper, but she had to work late at the clinic and said she would meet me in town, maybe for dessert, at nine o'clock.

I parked my truck by the Clark Fork River and walked back across the bridge toward downtown. The western sky was pink, the mountains unbroken and dark across the horizon. Down below I could see trout feeding on the flies that were hatching in the shadows of the bridge. The air smelled cold and heavy, and the runoff from the melting snow in the mountains had flooded the willows along the banks so that their branches trailed like lace in the water.

I walked farther into town and went into a saloon and cafe called the Oxford, which claimed to have never closed its doors since 1891.1 paid little attention to a waxed, black car across the street, and the three men in suits who sat inside it.

I ate a hamburger and drank a cup of coffee at the counter. Deeper inside the building was a darkened bar area where topless women were dancing on a runway. I finished eating and walked back outside and started to cross the street at the light. The black car pulled to the curb and a man in back opened a door for me. He was sandy-haired and pleasant-looking, and he held up a badge holder for me to see.

"Hop in, Mr. Holland. We'll give you a ride to your truck," he said.

"The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is running a jitney service?" I said.

"We justify our jobs any way we can. Come on, be a sport," he said.

I got inside and closed the door behind me. The two men in front did not turn around. We drove up the street, past an old vaudeville and movie theater that had been turned into a multiplex, and crossed the long bridge over the river. The mountains in the west were rimmed with fire and the air full of birds that swept in and out of the willows on the riverbank.

The agent in back had a folder open on his lap.

"You used to be one of us," he said.

"Yeah, it was a great life," I replied.

"It says here you meddled in a federal investigation down in Texas. That's not true, is it?" He smiled when he spoke.

"No, I don't recall that."

"You always eat supper in T amp;A joints?" the agent in the passenger's seat asked, without turning around.

"Single man. You know how it is," I said.

"Lamar Ellison hangs out there. Just coincidence you wander in?" the agent in the passenger's seat said.

"Oh, you know Lamar? He raped my friend's daughter," I said.

"My name's Amos Rackley. You know why we're here?" the agent in back said.

"I think I do."

"Good. We'd hate for a well-intentioned person like yourself to hurt one of our people. You understand me, don't you?" the agent named Amos Rackley said.

"Yes, sir," I said.

"I think he's a hard guy," the agent in the passenger's seat said to the driver. The hair on the back of his neck was shaved neatly above his collar, his skin pink, his jawline well defined.

"You talking about me?" I said.

"Your jacket says you were investigated for capping some Mexicans across the border. The Mexican authorities claimed they were wets wandering around in the desert," he said, turning his head so I could hear his words.

I leaned forward in my seat. "I remember some guys shooting at me down there. It's kind of fuzzy, though. I got hit twice. Maybe that's why my recall isn't as good as it should be," I said.

"He's a fast thinker, too," the agent in the passenger's seat said to the driver.

"That's enough, fellows. Pull in there," the agent named Amos Rackley said. He got out on his side of the car and waited for me to join him.

He put on his sunglasses and stared at the sunlight on the river's surface, then took them off again.

"You see the trout feeding in the shade? You can always see them better with dark glasses on. They cut the glare off the water," he said. He looked at me. "You're not interested in fish?"

"Yeah, I am."

"You got to forgive Jim. He lost some friends in the Oklahoma City bombing," Rackley said.

"A guy named Wyatt Dixon followed me up here. He's bad news," I said.

"You got that right. But that's our worry, not yours."

"Then get him out of my life-"

He raised the ball of his index finger at me before I could continue.

"Jim wasn't the only one who lost friends at Oklahoma City. You quit the Justice Department. You don't have a vote in what we do. If one of our people gets hurt because you've got your nose in the wrong place, I'm going to break it off," he said.

He got back into his car, and the three agents drove away. I stared after them, my face tight and insentient, as though a cold wind had just died and left my skin dead to the touch.

I went to the restaurant where I was supposed to meet Cleo but she wasn't there and she didn't answer her phone, either. I waited an hour, then drove back up the Blackfoot to Doc's house. I went to bed without seeing either Doc or Maisey and dreamed of Texas and a field of bluebonnets in which a white stallion splattered with blood tried to mount a mare that turned and bit him in the forequarters.

In the morningI discovered that Cleo had left three messages on Doc's answering machine. The messages said only that she had gotten to the restaurant late and did not explain why. I called her at home.