James Burke - Bitterroot

"Doc's usually not a drinker," I said.

"You could fool me," she said.

So she hadn't known him long, I thought, with more interest than I should have had as Doc's friend.

I heard the door open behind me and saw her eyes go past me and follow three men who had just entered. They wore yellow construction hats and khakis and half-topped boots, and their faces looked pinched and red from the wind. They sat at a table in the corner, one with a red-and-white-checkered cloth on it, and studied their menus.

"Those guys are from the Phillips-Carruthers Corporation. It's just as well Doc doesn't see them," Cleo said.

"Why not?"

"They work at the gold mine. They use cyanide to leach the gold out of the rock," she said.

"Near the river?" I said.

"Near everything."

I turned and looked at the men again. One of them glanced back at me over his menu, then sipped from his water glass and through the window watched a truck boomed down with logs pass in the rain.

"You think Doc's going to be all right?" I asked.

"I doubt it."

She looked at the expression on my face.

"He's an idealist. Idealists get in trouble," she said.

The waitress took our order. I heard more noise in the bar area and saw Doc talking to three bikers at a table, his graceful hands extended as though he were holding his spoken sentences between them.

"Excuse me a minute," I said.

I walked to the rear of the restaurant, which opened into a darkened, neon-lit bar area that was layered with cigarette smoke. I passed Doc without looking at either him or his listeners and continued toward the men's room. But I could smell the bikers, the way you smell a wild animal's presence in a cage. It was a viscous, glandular odor, like sweaty leather and unwashed hair and body grease and testosterone that has dried and become part of the person's clothes.

Behind me, Doc continued his earnest instruction to his audience: "See, you guys motor on in to Lincoln because you think it's a place with no parameters. The home of the Unabomber, right? A guy who had stink on him that would make buzzards fall out of the sky but who went unnoticed by the locals for twenty years.

"See, what you don't understand is these people are very square and territorial. One time a bunch of guys like you decided to take over a town in the Gallatin Valley on a Saturday afternoon. They started shoving people around in bars, busting beer bottles in the streets, riding their hogs across church lawns, you know, like in the Marlon Brando film The Wild One.

"Guess what? In two hours every mill worker, gypo logger, and sheepherder in the county came into town. They parked their log trucks across the roads so the bikers couldn't get out. They broke arms and legs and bent Harleys around telephone poles. Some of the bikers got down on their knees and begged. The townies left enough of the bikers intact to take the wounded into Billings."

I went into the men's room. When I came back out, Doc was still talking. The bikers smoked cigarettes and poured beer into their glasses and drank in measured sips, tipping their ashes into an empty can, occasionally glancing at one another.

One of their girls was watching the scene from the cigarette machine, her arms folded in front of her. She was an Indian, perhaps part white, her long hair streaked with strands of dull yellow. She wore a lavender T-shirt and Levi's that hung low on her hips, exposing her navel. She stared directly into my eyes. When I looked back at her, she tilted her head slightly as though I had not understood a point she was making.

"The waitress is fixing to throw your food out, Doc," I said.

"Go on. I'll be there," he replied, waving me away.

I went back out into the restaurant and sat down across from Cleo. A strand of her hair hung out of her baseball cap across one eye.

"Where do you and Doc know each other from?" I said, glancing back at the bar area.

"A support group," she replied.

"Pardon?"

"It's a group that meets in Missoula. For people who have-" She saw that I was still watching the bar area. "What are you asking for?"

"I'm sorry," I said, my attention coming back on her face. "You said a support group. I didn't know what you meant."

Her left hand was turned palm down on the table. There was no wedding ring on it. "It's for people who have lost family members to violence. Doc's wife died in a plane crash. My husband and son were murdered. So we attend the same meetings. That's how we met. I thought that's what you were asking me," she said.

The skin of my face felt tight against the bone. The restaurant seemed filled with the clatter of dishes and cacophonous conversation about insignificant subjects.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to-" I began, but the waitress arrived at the table and began setting plates of steak and potatoes in front of us. Cleo had already lost interest in anything I had to say by way of apology.

Behind her, the Indian biker girl from the bar walked between the tables, watching me, as though she knew me or expected me to intuit private meaning in her stare.

"Why not get a new cigarette machine instead of putting tape all over it? It not only looks like shit, the cigarettes don't come out," she said to the woman behind the cash register.

"Let me give you some breath mints instead. Oh, there's no charge. Don't they sell cigarettes on the reservation?" the cashier said.

The Indian girl took the last cigarette out of her pack and put it in her mouth, her weight on one foot, her eyes staring into the cashier's.

The cashier smiled tolerantly. "Sorry, honey. But you should learn how to talk to people," she said.

"My speech coach says the same thing. I'm always saying blow me to patronizing white people," the Indian girl said.

She paused by our booth and momentarily rested her fingers on the tabletop and lit her cigarette.

"Your doctor friend is in Lamar Ellison's face. I'd get him out of here," she said, her eyes looking straight ahead.

She walked away, toward the bar.

"Who is that?" Cleo said.

"I don't know. But I don't like eating at the O.K. Corral," I said.

I got up from the table and went back to the bar.

"Your food's getting cold, Doc," I said.

"I was just coming," he replied. Then he said to the bikers, "Y'all think on it. Why get your wick snuffed being somebody's hump? I'll check with you later."

I placed my hand under his arm and gently pulled him with me.

"What's wrong with you?" I said.

"You just got to turn these guys around. It's the rednecks who win the wars. The liberals are waiting around on a grant."

"We're eating supper, then blowing this place. Or at least I am."

"You're in Montana. This is no big deal."

He cut into his steak and put a piece into his mouth and drank from his beer, his eyes looking reflectively at the three engineers from the gold mine.

I waited for him to start in on another soliloquy, but an event taking place in the bar had suddenly captured his attention.

Two men and a woman had come in, people who were obviously from somewhere else, their features soft around the edges, their shoulders rounded, their faces circumspect yet self-indulgent and vaguely adventurous. They had taken a booth in the bar, then perhaps one of them had glanced at the bikers, or said something or laughed in a way a biker did not approve of, or maybe it was just their bad luck that their physical weakness gave off an odor like raw meat to a tiger.

One of the bikers took a toothpick out of his mouth and set it in an ashtray. He rose from his chair and walked to their booth, drinking from a long-necked beer bottle, his jeans bagging in the seat. He stared down at them, not speaking, the stench of his body and clothes rising into their faces like a stain.