James Burke - Bitterroot

When Hinkel sat down no one rose to rebut him. A long-haired kid in a fatigue jacket with a feather dangling from one earring stood up and made a rambling speech about Native Americans and wind power and the timber industry and missile silos east of the Divide. People's eyes crossed with boredom. Carl Hinkel now seemed like Clarence Darrow. "Say something, Doc."

"Fuck it. If they need the likes of me for a leader, they're not worth leading," he replied.

The sky was still bright when the meeting broke up and the audience drifted outside. The clouds were mauve-colored in the west and the rain blowing in the canyon at Alberton Gorge looked like spun glass against the light. I could smell the heavy, cold odor of the Clark Fork and the wetness of the boulders in the shadows along the banks and the hay that someone was mowing in a distant field. The riparian countryside, the purple haze on the mountains, the old-growth trees that were so tall they looked as if they lived in the sky, were probably as close to Eden as modern man ever got, I thought. But this wonderful part of the world was also one that Carl Hinkel and his friends, if given the opportunity, would turn into a separate country surrounded by razor wire and guard towers.

People who should have known better had stopped to chat with him. He was obviously a strong man physically, and he demonstrated his strength by picking up a plump little girl of ten or eleven and holding her out at arm's length.

"Excuse me, Mr. Hinkel," I said.

"Yes?" he said, turning toward me, his eyebrows raised.

"I keep having trouble with Wyatt Dixon. I don't think he does anything without your permission. The next time he bothers my son, I'm going to be out to your place and kick a nail-studded two-by-four up your sorry white ass."

"I'm afraid I don't know who you are," he said. "Oh, really?"

"I'm sixty years old, sir. It seems to me you embarrass your son and degrade yourself. But if you wish to physically attack me, do it and be done," he said.

The conversation died around us and every person on the motel's grass swale and tree-shaded driveway was now staring at me. Carl Hinkel waited, then put his pipe into his mouth and drew a thumbnail across the top of a match and lit the tobacco in his pipe bowl and gazed into the distance.

My face was red with shame. I turned and walked away, unable to believe my own vanity and stupidity. I heard Doc at my elbow.

"You're going about it the wrong way, bud. These guys don't fight fair," he said. "Tell me about it."

"My father always said God loves fools. Join the club. Don't worry. They're all going down," Doc said. He cupped his hand around the back of my neck like a baseball catcher mothering a pitcher who had just been shelled off the mound.

I turned and looked into his face.

"All going down?" I said.

I GUESS I had misjudged Doc's potential. Or at least Wyatt Dixon had.

The next night he was at home in the small log house Carl Hinkel had given him to use on the back of Hinkel's property. The moon was up and from his window he could see the lines of cottonwoods along the Bitterroot River and the monolithic shapes of the mountains against the sky and the thick stands of timber that grew into the canyons. A star shower burst above the valley and Wyatt Dixon wondered if the tracings of light across the darkness of the heavens were a sign, perhaps an indicator that an enormous historical change was at hand for him and his kind.

Or perhaps he thought nothing at all.

The night was cold, but neither cold nor heat had ever had an appreciable effect on him. He wore only a nylon vest over his skin when he walked down to the river with a cane pole and a can of worms and bobber-fished in an eddy behind a beaver dam. Two nights earlier he had spread the surface of the water with cornmeal, and now, in less than five minutes, he hooked what was at least a twenty-five-inch bull trout. He let the trout swallow the treble hook, down the throat and into the belly, so there would be no chance of its slipping off, then he horsed it onto the bank and picked it up by the tail and swung it like a sock full of wet sand and bashed its brains out on a rock.

As he walked back to his house he saw car lights through a stand of lodgepole pine on the neighbor's property, but the lights disappeared and he gave them no more thought. He slit the belly of his fish under an outside faucet and raked out the guts and threw them to one of Carl's cats, then he scrubbed his hands clean under the faucet and threaded a stick through the trout's gills and mouth and went inside his house.

Just inside the doorway a piece of bronze wire glistened once on the edge of his vision, then looped over his head and tightened around his neck, squeezing tendon and artery, shutting off air to his lungs and blood to his brain.

He lost both his sight and his consciousness as though he were watching a red-black liquid slide down the lens of a camera.

When he awoke his head snapped upward, like that of a man rising from a coffin, and the room, with all its familiar gunracks and deer and elk antlers and assortment of western hats and Indian blankets on the furniture and logs burning in the woodstove, came back into focus, everything in its right place, even the plastic suction device on the kitchen table that he used to clean impurities from the pores of his facial skin.

He realized he was seated in a chair and the wire loop that had razored into his flesh was no longer around his throat but on the floor by his foot and he saw that the loop had been fashioned from guitar strings. But his arms had been pinioned behind the chair and his wrists crossed and taped together, and his calves were secured to the chair's legs with wide strips of silver tape from his ankle to the knee. He looked at the intruder who sat on a straight-back wood chair no more than three feet from him.

"Howdy do, sir? My name is Wyatt Dixon. What might yours be?" he said.

"You don't know?" the intruder said.

"My guess is you're Maisey Voss's daddy. If that be the case, I'm honored to meet a decorated soldier such as yourself. That Bowie knife on your hip could saw the head off a hog, couldn't it?"

"You were going back into the men's room at the truck stop to buy rubbers?" Doc said.

"That's not a fit question to be asking a man, sir."

"You planned to rape my daughter."

"Some weight lifters or football farts, I don't know which, was trying to get into her pants. Excuse the language I use to describe what could have been a repeat scene for your poor little girl. But that's what happened, sir."

"What I don't understand about you is that evidently you're a brave man. Cruel people are almost always cowards. How would you explain the discrepancy, Mr. Dixon?"

"I can tell you are Mr. Holland's friend. You both are natural-born orators. Your speech is filled with philosophic content that is far beyond the understanding of a rodeo cowboy."

Doc got up from his chair and walked to the butane cookstove that was set in a small curtain-hung alcove that served as a kitchen. He turned the butane on and listened to it hiss through the unlit jets, then turned it off.

"It won't give you no satisfaction," Wyatt Dixon said.

"Why not?" Doc asked.

"'Cause you'll have given me power. 'Cause I'll live in you every morning you get up. Ask them who run Old Sparky at Huntsville Pen. They don't never eat breakfast alone."

"That doesn't apply to you?" Wyatt Dixon's silky red hair hung in his eyes like a little boy's. He shifted his weight on his small, hard buttocks and wet his lips.

"There's people that's different. We all know each other, though. It's a bigger club than you might think," Wyatt Dixon said.

"I think you've convinced me, Mr. Dixon."

"I don't rightly follow you, sir. But I have to say I'm in awe of your military background. You had Lamar Ellison spotting his drawers."