James Burke - Bitterroot

My heart raced and my skin crawled with apprehension. It was the same feeling I'd had when L.Q. Navarro and I had waited in ambush for Mexican tar mules deep in Coahuila, our palms sweating on our weapons, our wrists tingling with adrenaline. We washed the salt and insects out of our eyes with canteens and could hardly contain our excitement, one that bordered almost on sexual release, when we saw silhouettes appear on a hill.

Lucas was still not back from the concert. I drove to East Missoula and parked in front of the brick cottage where Sue Lynn Big Medicine lived with her uncle. As I walked up to the porch I thought I heard voices behind the building.

"Is that you, Lucas?" I said into the darkness.

"Oh, hi, Billy Bob," he replied, walking toward me. "Something wrong?"

"I'm not sure. What's Sue Lynn doing?"

"She says a prayer to all the Grandfathers. Those are the spirits who live in the four corners of the universe."

"A prayer about what?"

"People got their secrets," he replied.

"What's that supposed to mean?" I said.

"She carries a big load about something. It don't always help our love life."

"Come home with me," I said.

"She'll drive me. Everything's cool here."

"Did you see Wyatt Dixon at the concert?"

"Nope."

"He intends to do us harm, Lucas."

"He'd better not come around here. Sue Lynn's uncle was in the federal pen for cutting up a couple of guys on the Res."

"I can see this is a great place for a prayer garden. You're not moving in with this girl, are you?" I said.

"Quit calling her a girl. You worry too much, Billy Bob," he said, and hit me on the arm.

The innocence in his smile made my heart sink.

I drove back to Doc's place but found no release from the abiding fear that an undeserved fate was about to be visited upon someone close to me. The house was lighted and smoke flattened off the chimney and I could smell bread baking in the kitchen. Maisey played in front of the fireplace with her cat, the goodness in her young face undiminished by the violence the world had done her. Doc had an apron tied around his waist and was carrying two bread pans with hot pads to the plank table in the center of the kitchen. He had already laid out jars of blackberry and orange jam and a block of butter and a cold platter of fried chicken and a pitcher of milk on the table, and for just a moment I saw the tranquillity in his expression as he became both mother and doting father, and I was sure the bloodlust he had brought back from Vietnam had finally become a decaying memory.

But for some illogical reason I kept remembering a story, or rather an image, related to me by my grandfather about the death of the gunfighter John Wesley Hardin in the Acme Saloon in El Paso in 1895. Hardin was the most feared and dangerous man in Texas and may have killed as many as seventy-five men. In the Acme he was drinking shot-glass whiskey and rolling poker dice out of a leather cup. He inverted the cup and clapped the dice on the bar and said to a friend, "You got four sixes to beat."

That's when he heard a revolver cock behind him. A split second later a lawman named John Selman blew Hardin's brain matter on the mirror.

"You make me think of an ice cube sweating in a skillet. You worried about something?" Doc said.

"You rolled the dice for all of us, Doc," I replied.

"I'd change it if I could."

I paced up and down. "Did I get any phone calls?"

"Yeah, you did." He started slicing bread, the knife going snick, snick, snick into the plank table while I waited.

"From whom?"

"Cleo Lonnigan. She says you and Temple Carrol caused a scene at the concert."

"Is she crazy?"

"Yeah, probably."

"I appreciate your telling me that now."

"This bread is special. You want to try it with some jam?" he said.

An hour later, however, Doc's spirits died with the appearance of the sheriff's cruiser in the front yard, its emergency lights flashing.

"Step out here, Mr. Holland," the sheriff said.

"What do you want?" I asked.

"Are you hard of hearing?"

I walked out on the porch. Under the shadow of his hat the sheriff's face looked as hard and bloodless as a turnip.

"Where were you two hours ago?" he asked.

"In East Missoula. Talking with my son."

"Cleo Lonnigan says you were on her property, up the Jocko."

"She's delusional."

"You're under arrest for assault and battery. Put your hands on the banister. No, don't open your mouth, don't think about it, just do what I tell you," he said.

I leaned on the porch railing and felt his hands travel over my person.

"Who is he supposed to have assaulted?" Doc said behind me.

"Go back inside, Dr. Voss. If there was ever a double-header giant-size pain in the ass, it's you two. You better hope that man don't die," the sheriff said, and hooked up my wrists and turned me toward his cruiser.

"Which man? Who are you talking about?" I said.

"That homosexual carpenter you beat the shit out of with a piece of pipe, one with an iron bonnet on it. Why didn't you just run his head over with a tractor wheel while you was at it?"

"This is insane," I said.

"Tell that to Cleo Lonnigan. She wants your head on a post, Mr. Holland. You'd better be thankful I got to you first," he replied.

I TRIED to reason with him from the backseat of the cruiser as we headed toward the county jail. When we passed through East Missoula I craned my head to catch a glimpse of the salvage yard where I had left Lucas with Sue Lynn.

"Listen to me, Sheriff. I can't be in jail. Wyatt Dixon threatened both my son and Doc's daughter. That woman's lying. I couldn't have been up the Jocko. Stop and talk with Lucas."

"Shut up, Mr. Holland," the sheriff replied.

I kicked the wire-mesh screen. "You're a thickheaded old fool, sir. I'm an attorney. I don't beat up innocent people with metal objects. Use your judgment, for God's sake," I said.

"You hurt my vehicle, I'm gonna pull on a side road and take your bark off," he said.

In the holding cell I yelled down the corridor, demanded to use the phone, and shook the barred door against the lock. Finally a sleepy, overweight turnkey walked down the corridor and looked into my face.

"You want something?" he asked.

"To use the phone."

"It's out of order. We'll let you know when it's fixed," he said, and walked away.

At three in the morning the sheriff came down the corridor with a wood chair gripped in his hand. He set the chair in front of my cell and sat in it. He removed an apple wrapped in a paper bag from his coat pocket and began paring the skin away with a pocketknife.

"I checked with your son. He confirms your story," the sheriff said.

"Then kick me loose."

"Not till I tell Cleo she made a mistake. What'd you do to her, anyway?"

"You're keeping me here for my own protection?" I said incredulously.

A long curlicue of apple skin dangled from the sheriff's knife blade. "Let's see if I can remember her words. Something like 'I'd better not see that sorry sack of shit before you do.' You think she meant anything by that?"

"Where's my son?"

"Safe and snug in his tent. The Voss girl is with her daddy. You don't need to worry about them."

"Let me out of here, sir."

"I hear Carl Hinkel told you he was sixty years old outside that town meeting at the Holiday Inn. Made everybody think you was picking on an old man."

"I've had better moments."

"He's fifty-three. He isn't no military hero, either. He was kicked out of the Army for running some kind of PX scam in Vietnam. You know how you can tell when Carl Hinkel is lying? His lips are moving."

The sheriff split the apple longways and hollowed the seeds out of the pulp and stuck one piece into his mouth and speared the other half on his knife blade and extended it through the bars. "You got a good heart, Mr. Holland. But I suspect you was off playing pocket pool when the Lord passed out the brains."