James Burke - Bitterroot

Later, I lay down on a bench at the back of the cell and rested my arm across my eyes and tried to sleep. But I found no rest. L.Q. Navarro stood in the gloom, his arms folded, one foot propped backward on the wall, his eyes lost in thought.

"Want to share what's on your mind?" I asked.

"Wyatt Dixon's gonna pay you back by hurting somebody close to you he don't have no connection with hisself."

"Who?" I asked.

"He's a cruel man. He's got womanhood on the brain. You figure it out."

"He's seen me with Cleo. Maybe it was Dixon who busted up her carpenter."

"Good try, bud," L.Q. replied, and looked toward the window as a clap of dry thunder rolled through the mountains.

The light was turning gray outside and the storm clouds of last night now looked as if they were filled with snow. A trusty walked by my cell door with a mop and bucket in one hand.

"Get the turnkey down here," I said to him.

Temple went to the health club for her workout at six that morning. She couldn't believe the change in the weather. The temperature had dropped perhaps forty degrees and the fir trees at the top of the canyon were powdered with snow. She went up to the Nautilus room on the second floor of the club and did stomach crunches on a recliner board and watched through the window as a gray curtain of rain and mist and snow moved through the canyon, obscuring the cliff walls, smudging the trees, leaving only the emerald green ribbon of the river inside the mist.

The parking lot was white now and she could see the curlicues of car tracks on the cement and her Ford Explorer parked by the river. A low-slung red automobile pulled up on the far side of it, as though the driver could not decide whether to park. Then the mist and snow swirled over the lot and her vehicle faded and disappeared inside it.

She finished her workout and showered and dressed in her khaki jeans and a warm flannel shirt and her scuffed boots and put on a cotton jacket with a hood and began to tie it with a drawstring, then accidently pulled the plastic tippet off the string. She dropped the tippet into her shirt pocket and hung her workout bag on her shoulder and walked to her vehicle.

She shut the Explorer's door and started the engine. The windows had frosted and she turned on the heater and felt the coldness of the air surge into her face. While she waited for the engine to warm and the air vents to dry the moisture on the windows she pushed in the cigarette lighter so she could soften the plastic tippet and mold it back on the drawstring of her hood.

For just a second she saw a man's face under a hat brim in the rearview mirror, then the face slipped out of the glass and a pair of arms and gloved hands seized her neck and upper torso. Her attacker's strength was incredible. He lifted her over the seat and into the back as though she were stuffed with straw. Then he fitted his forearms on her neck and began to squeeze.

But the cigarette lighter was still in her hand and she reached backward with it blindly and felt the heated coils bite into his skin. An odor like animal hair burning in a trash barrel struck her nostrils. Even with the blood flow to her brain shutting down she held the lighter tightly against his flesh. She expected him to give up, his arms to fling her from him, but instead his body trembled and grew more rigid as he ate his pain and tightened his hold on her neck and crushed her head into the point of his chin, a grinding sound like a wood saw rasping against metal issuing from his throat.

The defroster was forming an oval-shaped clear area over the steering wheel now and Temple could see snow crystals blowing horizontally above the river. She could see college kids in bright winter clothes climbing a zigzag trail to the top of the mountain, their scarves whipping in the wind. She could see orange cliffs and trees and a solitary ball of tum-bleweed bouncing across the land toward her vehicle. Her right hand went limp and she felt the cigarette lighter drop from her fingers, then the vision in her left eye clouded over and one side of her body went dead and she saw the tumbleweed bounce once over the hood of her vehicle and slap wetly against the defrosted clearing on the window glass like an angry man stuffing a cork in a bottle.

When she awoke, her eyes were bound and she was being carried under the thighs and back by someone with arms that were as hard as oak. Her head was pressed against his chest and she could hear the whirrings of his heart and feel the rise and fall of his lungs as he carried her through trees and across ground that was littered with leaves and dead twigs.

She tried to raise her hands, then realized they were taped at the wrists and the tape was wound around her body. The man carrying her knelt to the ground and placed her on pine needles and leaves that were cold against her skin where her shirt had pulled out of her jeans. She could hear a river down below, roaring through a canyon or perhaps over rocks, and she could smell the coldness of the water and the clean odor of new snow in the wind. Then she heard a shovel bite into the earth and she swallowed with a type of fear she had never experienced before.

"Why are you doing this?" she asked. But her words were lost in the sounds of the river. She heard a second shovel chopping at the ground, the metal clanging against rocks, scraping back soil into a pile, the way someone might use an Army entrenching tool, and she knew two people were now digging her grave.

She tried to sit up, but a large hand restrained her, pressing her back onto the ground. The man lowered his face to hers, and she felt his breath on her skin and she knew his eyes were examining her mouth and nose and hair, like a curious animal investigating prey he had stumbled upon in a den. One finger traced a mole by the corner of her mouth, then his knuckle moved up and down her jawline, and she was convinced she had never been touched by a more brutal hand. It was sheathed in callus, as though the tissue had been rubbed with brick dust or burned and hardened with chemicals. The pads of the fingers had the texture of emery paper.

His thumb brushed her lips and his nail played with her teeth, then he pried them apart and inserted a rubber hose in her mouth.

"No, don't be trying to spit it out, now. That ain't smart. No-sirree-bob," the man's voice said.

But she did it anyway, spitting the hose out as well as the unwashed taste of his hand.

"You motherfuckers," she said, turning her head, trying to sight her words on his face.

"A profane woman brings discredit on her gender. Please do not use words of that nature to me again. I declare, this world has done become a toilet," the man said.

He fitted his hands under her arms and dragged her into a depressed, rocky place that caused her heels to drop abruptly into the hardness of the ground. Then the two diggers began burying her alive, flinging spadeful after spadeful of dirt onto her body.

She was amazed at how little time it took for her feet, then her calves and thighs and stomach and chest and arms to be weighted and encased with dirt and rock that seemed to hold her as solidly as cement. One of the diggers stopped work and dropped his shovel on the ground and knelt down and removed a strand of hair from the edge of her mouth.

Then he touched the hose against her teeth, and this time she opened her mouth and took it.

The diggers went back to work, and she felt the dirt strike her cheeks like dry rain and the earth close on her face. The noise of the river and the voices of the diggers disappeared, as though effaced from the surface of the world, and the only sound she could hear was her own breathing through the hose and the thump of large stones being dropped into place on top of her.