James Burke - Bitterroot

Temple and I sat midway up in the stands. Her cheeks were as red as a doll's, her mouth like a small purple flower, her face glowing with the perfection of the evening. But it was obvious her thoughts were far away.

"I came up to Montana because Doc asked me to. But maybe I should head back to Deaf Smith," she said.

"I need you here, Temple," I said, my eyes looking straight ahead.

"I'm not convinced Doc's an innocent man," she said.

"Guilty or innocent, we still defend him."

"Let me put it another way. You've got a girlfriend with Mob connections. She also has an obsession about this biker gang, the Berdoo Jesters."

"The sheriff told you this?"

"Don't worry about who told me. If you want me to work with you, you'd better haul your head out of your ass."

A drunk cowboy in front of us heard the last statement and turned around and grinned.

"How about saving it till later?" I said to Temple.

"Fine," she replied, and sipped from her soda can, her throat streaked with color.

I touched her on the top of her hand in hopes she would look back at me. But she didn't.

The crowd out on the dance slab was hard-core working class: truck drivers, horse wranglers, waitresses, gypo loggers, Indian feed growers, bale buckers, 4-H kids, women who drank beer with one hand and smoked with the other while they bumped rumps, petty criminals scrolled with jailhouse art, barroom strippers dancing for their own gender with undisguised erotic joy, a group of fist-fighting drunks charter-bused from a saloon, and three Indians who kept squatting down below eye level to inhale huge mouthfuls of white smoke off a crack pipe.

Then I saw my son dancing with Sue Lynn Big Medicine, like kids from the early fifties. She wore a black cowboy hat and a denim shirt with the sleeves cut off at the armpits and black jeans that were dusty in the rump. She danced close to Lucas without actually touching his body, her blond-streaked hair hanging to her shoulders, her chin lifted in the air. With each beat in the music she raised one booted foot behind her, her Roman profile opaque, the brim of his hat touching hers when he leaned over her, his shadow like a protective screen between her and the glare of the world.

"You going to talk to me at all?" I said to Temple.

She finished her soda and set the empty can between us. She seemed to concentrate on the stage. "Was Haggard really in the pen?" she said.

"Yeah, Quentin or Folsom."

"I don't think he's the only graduate here. Take a look at that bunch by the side of the stage," she said.

Three head-shaved, bare-chested young men, wearing laced, steel-toed boots and bleached jeans without belts, were drinking canned beer and watching the dancers from the edge of the cement slab. Their skin was jailhouse white, emblazoned with swastikas and red and black German crosses, their torsos plated and tapered with the muscle development of dedicated, on-the-yard bench pressers. Each wore a stubble mustache and goatee, so that his mouth looked like a dirty hole leering out of the whiteness of his face.

"Is that Carl Hinkel with them?" Temple said.

"That's the man. The George Lincoln Rockwell of the Bitterroot Valley."

Then two other men walked from the rest room area and joined them. One was a slender kid with glasses and a crooked smile on his mouth, an ever-present facial insult that allowed him to offend others without giving them sufficient provocation to tear him apart. His companion had large, wide-set teeth and virtually colorless eyes and wore a flowered green shirt with purple garters on the sleeves, a polished rodeo buckle against his corrugated stomach, and new, stiff jeans that were hitched tightly around his genitalia.

Temple was watching my face. "What's wrong?" she asked.

"That's Wyatt Dixon. I can't think of a worse time for that guy to show up."

Dixon had seen Lucas and Sue Lynn out on the dance slab. He put a cigar into his mouth and popped a kitchen match on his thumbnail and cupped the flame to the cigar in the shadow of his hat. He stood duck-footed, smoking, an amused light in his face, and watched Lucas and Sue Lynn dance. Then he walked out onto the slab, his shoulders pushing aside anyone who chanced to move into his path.

When, as a father, do you intervene in your son's life and perhaps steal his self-respect? I'd never had an answer to that question.

"I'll be back," I said to Temple, and walked down the wood stairs onto the cement slab.

Dixon stood inches from Lucas and Sue Lynn, his back to me, saying something I couldn't hear. But I saw the heat climb into Sue Lynn's face and the bewilderment in Lucas's.

"You want to talk to me, Mr. Dixon?" I said.

He screwed his head around, his cigar clenched in his teeth, his profiled right eye like a clear glass bubble.

"I declare, people from all walks of life has shown up here tonight. It ain't accident you and the boy favor, is it?" he said.

"How about I buy you a beer?" I said.

"No, thank you, sir. I aim to dance. Sue Lynn don't mind. She and me has bellied up before in what you might call private-type situations."

Lucas's hat was pushed back on his head and his hands hung awkwardly at his sides. There were red circles, like apples, in his cheeks.

"What's with you, man?" he said to Wyatt Dixon.

"I'm a great admirer of womanhood, son. I respect every part of their God-made bodies, and this 'un here done won my heart a long time ago. Now go over yonder and sit down and drink you a soda pop. Ask your daddy to tell you about my sister, Katie Jo Winset. Her fate was a great Texas tragedy."

Dixon reached out with two forked knuckles toward Lucas's nose, but Lucas stepped backward and slapped Dixon's hand away, disbelieving the insult to his person even as it took place. Dixon smiled and glanced toward the purple glow on the hills, breathing in the heavy fragrance of the evening, then lowered his hand between Lucas and Sue Lynn and fastened it on Lucas's scrotum. That's when Lucas hit him.

The blow knocked Dixon's hat off his head, but the grin never left his face.

"I still got your package in my hand, boy. You want, I can tear it out root and stem," he said.

I swung my fist into Dixon's ear but it was like hitting stone. He turned his head slowly toward me, his ear bleeding, his right hand tightening on my son's genitalia.

"I'm gonna come for you, Mr. Holland. You'll smell me in the dark, then you'll feel my hand fasten on you, and the next day you'll be somebody else," he said.

I swung my fist into his mouth and felt the edges of his teeth cut into my skin. Then his friends were upon me.

The fight rolled through the concession area. I can't describe what happened with any certitude, because since I had been a young boy anger had always affected me in the same way whiskey does a drunkard. I would hear whirring sounds in my ears, then I would be inside a dead zone filled with shards of red and yellow light, a place where I felt neither physical pain nor any form of moral restraint.

I remember being knocked into the side of a horse tank, of hearing hooves thudding inside the livestock pens, then picking up a shaved wooden pole, about four foot in length, and smashing it into the face of a man who had a swastika tattooed between his eyes. I kicked a man who was on the ground, hard, in the spleen, and again in the head. Women were screaming, an overweight rent-a-cop was flung into a water puddle, and I swung the wood pole like a baseball bat and saw blood fly against the canvas side of a tepee and saw the man I'd hit fall on his knees and weep.

But it was Wyatt Dixon I wanted. As in a dream, I flailed at my attackers, but the source of my rage stood on the edge of the fray and grinned, adjusting the garters on his sleeves, one ear leaking a scarlet line down his jawbone.