James Burke - Bitterroot

I left Doc and Maisey in the cafe, crossed the street to the courthouse, and went to the sheriff's office. The sheriff had called Doc's house up on the Blackfoot the previous night and had left the type of recorded message that not only irritates but leaves the listener vaguely unsettled and apprehensive: "Mr. Holland, this is Sheriff J. T. Cain. Got a bit of information for you. Eight-forty-five, my office. You can't make it, be assured I'll find you."

I took off my hat and opened his office door. "I'm Billy Bob Holland. I hope I'm not in trouble," I said.

"That makes two of us," he answered.

He was a big, crew-cropped, white-haired man, who wore a suit and black, hand-tooled boots. His skin was deeply tanned, his neck and face as wrinkled as a brown leaf.

A folder full of fax sheets was spread open on his desk blotter.

"You recall a man named Wyatt Dixon?" he asked.

"Not offhand."

"He got out of a county lock three or four days ago in West Texas. He left behind a sheet of notebook paper with a half dozen names on it. Also a drawing of human heads in a wheelbarrow. Yours was one of the names."

"Who contacted you?" I asked.

"The sheriff down there ran your name through the computer. You were a Texas Ranger?"

"Yes, sir."

He fitted on his spectacles and peered down at a fax sheet.

"It says here you and your partner were investigated in the killing of some drug mules down in Mexico," he said.

"Rumors die hard," I replied.

He read further on the fax sheet, his eyes stopping on one paragraph in particular. His eyes became neutral, as though he did not want to reveal the knowledge they now held.

He picked up a clipboard and propped it at an angle against his desk. "You're not gonna kill anybody up here, are you?" he said.

"Wouldn't dream of it."

His pencil moved on the clipboard, then his face lifted up at me again.

"You're an attorney now?" he said.

"Yes, sir."

He wrote something on his clipboard.

"You know what bothers me? You haven't asked me one question about this guy Wyatt Dixon," he said.

"A lot of graduates make threats. Most never show up," I said.

He studied his clipboard and tapped on the metal clamp with his mechanical pencil.

"I can't argue with that," he said. "But Dixon did five years in Huntsville before he got picked up in Fort Davis for drunk driving. He did time in California, too. His record indicates he's a violent and unpredictable man. You're not curious at all?"

"I don't know him, Sheriff. If we're finished here…" I said.

He tossed his clipboard on the desk. A half-completed crossword puzzle was fastened in place under the spring clamp.

"There's what the press calls 'militia' down in the Bitterroot Valley. I think they're just a bunch of ass-wipes myself. But your friend Dr. Voss is doing his best to stir them up. Maybe he needs a friend to counsel him," the sheriff said.

"He's not a listener," I replied.

"I've got the feeling you're not, either," he said. He took a gingersnap out of a paper bag and bit it in half with his dentures. But the humor in his eyes did not disguise the bemused, perhaps pitying look he gave me when I rose to leave his office.

Doc's HOUSE was at the northern end of a valley above the little settlement of Potomac, and you had to cross the river on a log bridge trussed together with rusted cable and drive five miles on a poor road through dense stands of timber to reach it. At night the light played tricks in the sky. Even though the house was located between cliffs and ridgelines, the clouds would reflect the glow of Missoula, or perhaps the bars in the mill town of Bonner, or cities out on the coast. But through the screen window, as I looked up from my bed, I thought I could see distant places upside down in the sky.

Doc said Montana was filled with ghosts. Those of Indians massacred on the Marias River, wagoners who died of cholera and typhus on their way to Oregon, the wandering spirits of Custer and the soldiers of the Seventh Cavalry, whose bodies were sawed apart with stone knives and left on the banks of what the Sioux and Northern Cheyenne called the Greasy Grass.

But I didn't need to change my geography to see apparitions.

When the Missoula County sheriff had read the fax sheets in his folder, his eyes had lighted on a detail he chose not to mention.

Years ago, on a nocturnal and unauthorized raid into Coahuila, I accidentally shot and killed the best friend I ever had.

Today the spirit of my dead friend accompanied me wherever I went. L. Q. Navarro was lean and mustached, with grained skin and lustrous black eyes, and he wore the clothes he had died in, a pinstripe suit and vest with a glowing white shirt, an ash-gray Stetson sweat-stained around the crown, and dusty boots and rowled Mexican spurs that tinkled like tiny bells when he walked.

I saw him at evening inside mesquite groves traced with fireflies, sitting on top of a stall in a shaft of sunlight on Sunday morning while I bridled my Morgan to go to Mass, or sometimes idly looking over my shoulder while I fished the milky-green river at the back of my property. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, he assured me the purple wound high up on his chest was not my fault.

That was L.Q. His courage, his stoic acceptance of his fate, his refusal to accuse became the rough-hewn cross and set of nails that waited for me every night in my sleep.

When trouble comes into your life in such a marrow-eating, destructive fashion that eventually you are willing to undergo surgery without anesthesia to rid yourself of it, you inevitably look back at the moment when somehow you blundered across the wrong Rubicon. There must have been a defining moment where it all went south, you tell yourself. Great astronomical signs in the sky that you ignored.

No, you simply took the wrong exit off a freeway into what appeared to be a deserted neighborhood lighted by sodium lamps, or trustingly signed a document handed you by a good-natured, bald-headed man, or released the deadbolt on your door so an accident victim could use your telephone.

Doc asked me to meet him and a ladyfriend at a restaurant and bar in the mist-shrouded, logging town of Lincoln, high up in the mountains by Rogers Pass. I parked my truck and walked past a dozen chopped-down Harleys into the warmth and cheerful brightness of the restaurant and saw Doc sitting in a booth with a tall woman whose dark hair was pushed up inside a baseball cap.

An empty pitcher of beer rested between them.

There was a flush in Doc's throat, an unnatural shine in his eyes.

"This is Cleo Lonnigan. She practices meatball medicine at the Res," Doc said.

"That means I work part time at the free clinic," the woman said. She had dark eyelashes and brown eyes and a mole on her chin. Her high shoulders and slacks and beige silk shirt, one that changed colors in the light, made me think of a photograph taken of my mother when my mother worked in an aircraft plant in California during the war.

Somebody in the bar turned up the jukebox so loud that it shook the wall, then the bartender came from behind the bar and turned the volume down again. A woman laughed in a shrill voice, as though enjoying an obscene joke.

"You see those bikers back there? They think they're nineteenth-century guys who've found the last piece of the American West," Doc said. "What I'm saying is they're actually victims. It's like a bug on a highway facing down an eighteen-wheeler. They're just not students of history, you follow?"

"I'm ready to order. Do you want a steak, Doc?" Cleo said, smiling, obviously not wanting him to drink more.

"Sure. I'll get us a refill," Doc replied.

"Not for me," I said. But he wasn't listening.

I watched him work his way between the tables toward the bar, excusing himself when he bumped against someone's chair.