James Burke - Bitterroot

It was in California that his luck did the big flush, over a union card, locked out of the Operating Engineers because he couldn't pass a tenth-grade arithmetic test. Then he got evicted from his hotel in Santa Monica and had to sell his scooter and move into South Central. A Crip shoved him down a stairs. Two Bloods listened to him ask directions to the bus line, then roared at his cracker accent, and tossed him from a fire escape into a Dumpster filled with rotting produce.

Screw that. If he had to live in a toilet, he might as well go native and enjoy it. So he got in on the next Los Angeles riot. The gangbangers, the illegals, the pipeheads, the out-of-work peckerwoods like himself, everybody on the South Side was burning out the Koreans, looting liquor stores and pawnshops, pulling business types out of their cars and robbing them and busting bottles over their heads, all of it on TV, helicopters swirling overhead while the cops stood behind their own barricades and watched. It was like going apeshit in a war zone, except the other side wasn't allowed to shoot back. There was definitely an upside to slum life and social protest, Tommy Lee told himself.

But after five days of watching the city burn, the Army finally moved in, setting up sandbags and machine guns, herding looters into six-bys. Guess who they nail? Because he was white, that was it. Three dozen cannibals are running out of the appliance store, carrying TVs and stereo players on their heads, and here he comes, tripping through the broken glass, trying to heft a huge microwave out the window for this black broad who promised she'd haul his ashes if he scored something nice for her kitchen, and whop, he gets a baton right across the spine.

Then lands on all fours and watches a.25 auto spill out of his pocket onto the sidewalk.

Next stop, San Quentin, the beaner and melon picker capital of America. Where a short white dude with fishbowl glasses and a hush-puppy accent is anybody's portable pump.

That's when he met Lamar Ellison, out on the yard, Lamar wearing mirrored sunglasses, eye-balling the cannibals, cleaning his nails with a toothpick. "I can put you with the AB, Tommy Lee. They're righteous dudes and they look after their own. You'll walk on water, my man," Lamar said.

You couldn't mistake the AB out on the yard, clanking iron, their bodies glowing with stink, sweat popping on their tattoos, their shaved heads wrapped with blue and red bandannas to show their contempt for the Crips and the Bloods.

Three years in Quentin and not one black dude or East L.A. bean roller ever put a hand on him. No one stole cigarettes or scarf out of his house, and the worst wolf in the joint would emasculate himself before trying to put moves on him in the shower. Business types thought they had respect? Unless you'd been in the Aryan Brotherhood, you didn't know the meaning of the word.

The downside was the nature of the dues. The AB was for life.

He was going to miss Montana. Next week Merle Haggard was playing at the Mule Palace up in the Jocko Valley. Man, he'd like to see that, the Hag, an Okie by way of Bakersfield, who'd done two and one half years at Quentin and was still a legend there, bigger than Cash or Paycheck, living proof you could wear state blues and still reenter the world and get sprinkled with starshine.

He threw the last box of his belongings into his car and went back into the house to unscrew all the lightbulbs, remove the toilet paper roll, and tear out the elk rack the last tenant had left nailed above the living room door.

But no matter how he tried to occupy himself or stay in motion, he could not shake a recurring image out of his head.

It was the Voss girl. With her face pressed down under the pillow, her body writhing, her fists striking at his chest. Why had he let Lamar talk him into busting a sixteen-year-old girl, one who'd dime them all as soon as she could get to a phone?

But secretly he knew the answer. He'd been afraid of Lamar. And not only of Lamar, but of Tommy Lee's father, who'd been a gunbull in the Georgia penal system, of people who made fun of his sawed-off torso, of guys who rode with the Jokers and Outlaws and Angels and Banditos and kept him around like a pet, a motorized goof they sent for cigarettes and beer and sometimes cheap rock down in Boon Town.

In fact, Tommy Lee could not remember when he had not been afraid.

But Lamar had gotten his. Big Time. Soaked in paint thinner and flame-roasted from head to foot like a burned burrito. Man, he didn't want to think about it. Nor about the fact the girl's father was out on bail, a doctor who was some kind of government-trained killing machine.

A doctor who kills people? The illogic of it hurt his head.

Time to slide on down the road, he thought. He stuffed two lightbulbs into his jeans pockets and hefted a box of canned goods on one shoulder and the elk rack on the other and pushed open the front door and stepped out into the coldness of the night.

A hatted figure was standing at the corner of the house, holding a revolver in two hands, the barrel pointed at the ground.

"Who is that?" Tommy Lee said.

There was no answer. The hatted figure raised the revolver at arm's length and aimed, the knees squatting slightly into a classic shooter's position.

Tommy Lee knew that somehow he could make words come out of his mouth that would show the hatted figure he was no threat to anyone, that in the big scheme of things his worst offenses were only those of a motorized goof, a harmless, good-natured little guy the swinging dicks took care of. What did this guy in the hat want? Why didn't the guy say something? Tommy Lee's skin felt as if it were being peeled off his face.

He couldn't keep his thoughts straight. In his mind he saw the farm in Georgia where he had grown up, a girl who had asked him to dance with her at a high school prom, a red molten sun descending into the Gulf of Mexico. He wanted all these things back in his life and would pay any price to return to them. If he could only make that happen, he would correct all the wrongs he had done and make amends to every person he had ever harmed.

If only the hatted figure with the shadowed face would please point the revolver somewhere else.

He had almost formed the sentence that would contain all those thoughts when the pistol barrel exploded with light and sound and the copper-jacketed round punched a neat hole through the right lens of his glasses and blew a single spurt of blood out the back of his head onto the grass.

Sheriff J. T. Cain knocked on Doc's door early the next morning.

"Where were you last night?" he said.

"Here," Doc said.

"All night?"

"Yeah, I was here all night."

"Doing what?" the sheriff said.

"Sleeping."

"You vouch for that?" the sheriff said to me.

"What's this about, Sheriff?" I said.

"Nothing much. Another dead man. Step out here, please," he said to me.

I followed him to his car. The sun wasn't up yet, and fog rose off the boulders in the river and hung in the trees. The sheriff stood with his hands on his hips, his cowboy hat slanted on his head, his wide red tie clipped to his shirt.

"That man in there didn't leave the house last night?" he asked.

"To my knowledge, no."

"To your knowledge, huh? Take a ride with me."

"What for?"

"You defense lawyers spend too much time in your office. I want you to see the handiwork of our shooter."

I got into his car and we rode west of Missoula, up the long grade toward the Idaho line. The mountains were green with Douglas fir, the crests tumbling higher and higher against a salmon-colored sky. Then the Clark Fork dropped away in the canyons below us and finally disappeared from view altogether.