James Burke - Bitterroot

"My son's staying out at Doc's. I'd like for you to meet him," I said.

But she made no reply.

I stood next to her at the drainboard. Through the window the Douglas fir trees on the hill crest looked hard and perpendicular against the sky. I placed my hand on her back. "You have to be at the clinic this afternoon?" I said.

"Not really."

"You have any other commitments?" I said, touching her hair.

"I have a lot of chores to do," she said.

I nodded and took my hand away.

"You interrogated me, Billy Bob. I don't care for it," she said.

"Nicki Molinari is a dope dealer and a degenerate. He not only kills people, he has them taken apart."

"You don't have to tell me that. My husband brought him to our house. He used our phone to have a chippy delivered to his motel."

It was not a time to say anything else. In fact, I was tired of playing the fool's role. I picked up my hat and left. When I was driving back out the front gate, I saw her in the rearview mirror, standing in the doorway, her dress blowing across her thighs.

I WENT BACK to Doc's and found Lucas sitting on the front steps, playing his guitar. It was a Martin HD-28, one I had given him for his birthday. The lightest touch of the plectrum on the strings resonated out of the box with the deep, mellow quality of sound that might have been aged in oak.

"Here's one I bet you don't know," he said. Then he began to sing,

"I'm an old log hauler,

I drove a big truck.

I shot the pinball machine,

But it caused me bad luck.

All I ever made

On a pinball machine

Was four katty-corners,

Then I'd miss the sixteen."

He rested his arm across the top of the Martin, careful not to scratch the finish with the button on the cuff of his denim shirt.

"That's one of them old ones," he said.

"Really?" I said, trying not to smile at what he considered old. "Where is everybody?"

"Doc and Maisey had a fight. I don't know where he went, but she took off with some high school boy.

Does Maisey act kind of funny for a girl who's been raped?" he said.

"How's that?"

"The way she was dressed and acting. Hoop earrings, fire-engine makeup, one of them bras that-" His eyes went away from mine, as they always did when he felt he had to protect me from his generation's knowledge of the world.

"That what?" I said.

"It don't exactly signal a guy to keep his big-boy in his britches."

"That's how it works, Lucas."

"What works?" he asked.

"Rape victims want to show they still have control. So they try to fly back through the candle flame."

He seemed to study the thought, his fingers chord-ing without sound on the neck of the guitar. "An Indian gal was looking for you," he said.

"Sue Lynn?"

"She didn't say. She has blond streaks in her hair. What's the deal on her?" He threaded his plectrum through the strings at the top of the guitar neck and adjusted his straw hat and gazed abstractly at the river.

"Why?" I said.

"No reason. She said she liked country music. I was showing her some chords."

"I'd leave her alone."

"She seemed pretty nice."

"She hangs with some bad dudes. Why not keep things simple and enjoy the trout fishing?"

He fed a stick of gum into his mouth and nodded his head slowly, as though humbly agreeing with a profound statement.

"That's how come you been milking through Doc's fence?" he said.

I walked on inside the house and hung my hat on a wood peg and poured a glass of iced tea in the kitchen. Through the front door I could see him putting his guitar inside its case, tucking the cloth strap around its edges, gum snapping in his jaw, his eyes bright with a thought he couldn't handle. He got up from the porch step, the guitar case still open, and came inside.

"I didn't mean to say that."

"I asked for it."

He grinned and spun his hat on his finger. "Who am I to argue with superior minds?" he said.

Temple Carrol had been told the juvenile file on Wyatt Dixon's knife-throwing friend, Terry Witherspoon, had been sealed. But there was another avenue. Temple had written down the name of the small town in western North Carolina where Witherspoon had been convicted, and I called the sheriff's department in the county seat there and asked to talk with any officer on duty who handled juvenile cases.

My call was transferred to a detective named Benbow.

"Terry Witherspoon's a suspect in a murder investigation in Montana?" he said.

"Not exactly."

"Sounds a mite vague, Mr. Holland. Regardless, his records were sealed a long time ago. For all I know they were destroyed when he reached legal age."

"You know him?" I asked.

"I wish I didn't."

"Give me a thread," I said.

"You say you were a Texas Ranger?"

"Yes, sir."

I waited.

"Then you know the rules. Wish I could help," he said, and hung up.

But a half hour later he called back.

"I can't tell you anything about the records the court has sealed. We clear on that?" he said.

"You bet."

"But I can tell you about suspicions I have that never became part of a formal investigation. A year ago we had a bomber hid out in these mountains. I think Terry was bringing him food. I don't have any evidence to prove that. But I've known Terry since he was seven years old, and he's the meanest little shit I ever came acrost."

"He's hooked up with terrorists?"

"The cause will find Terry, not the other way around. A farmhouse was broken into not far from the caves where this bomber was hid out. The owner and his wife probably came home and surprised the intruder. He tied them both to chairs and stuffed gags in their mouths. Then he cut the woman's throat and shot the man."

"You think Witherspoon did it?"

"The FBI still hasn't caught the bomber. Whoever was feeding him knew every cave in this county. I think the same guy killed the two people in the farmhouse. We have a small population here. To my knowledge, we've produced only one kid around here the likes of Terry Witherspoon. You know what kills me about this stuff, Mr. Holland?"

"What's that?"

"The only job this simpleton ever had was boxing up groceries at a supermarket. We'll spend our careers getting a net over a box boy."

"You know why he came out to Montana?"

"He said he wanted to be a mountain man in a whites-only nation. Is it true you can buy Montana T-shirts that say 'At Least Our Cows Are Sane'?"

That night, outside a small settlement near the Idaho border, a truncated man with arms that were too short for his torso was carrying everything he owned out of a clapboard house and packing it into his automobile. The moon had just risen above the hollow where the man lived, and the crests of the mountains were black against the sky and the hard-packed dirt road in front of the house wound like a flattened white snake under the railroad trestle, past other dilapidated houses, out to the four-lane highway the man planned to drive full-bore all the way to the Cascades and Seattle.

The man's name was Tommy Lee Stoltz, and he wore a black cowboy hat mashed down on his ears and engineering boots with double soles and heels and thick glasses that made his eyes look like large marbles. Tiny blue teardrops were tattooed just below the corners of his eyes so that he appeared to be in a state of perpetual mourning. The night air was cold but he was sweating inside his clothes and his heart raced each time he heard automobile or truck tires on the dirt road.

Why had he ever left Florida? He'd had a good life dry-walling, hanging in open-air bars down on the beach, getting ripped on beer and cheap weed that was smuggled in from the islands, and opening up his scooter on Seven-Mile Bridge. Even that one-bit he did on a road gang in the Keys wasn't bad. The winter days were beautiful, and the fish was fresh and deep-fried and, if you wanted it, the Cubans on the serving line at the stockade would heap shitpiles of black beans and rice on your plate.