James Burke: Bitterroot

"Somebody's got to put a tether on those boys," Doc said.

"Don't do it, Tobin," I said.

Doc wiped the steak grease off his mouth and hands with a napkin, the alcoholic warmth gone from his eyes now, and walked back toward the bar.

Cleo rested her forehead on her fingers and let out her breath.

"This was a mistake. It's time to go," she said. She looked up at me. "Aren't you going to do something?"

"It's somebody else's fight," I said.

"How chivalric," she said.

"Doc resents people mixing in his business."

"I'm going to get him out of there if you won't."

"Ask the waitress for the check," I said, and returned to the bar area.

The biker towering over the three tourists wore a leather vest with no shirt and steel-toed engineering boots; his jaws and chin were heavy with gold stubble, his hair tangled in snakes like a Visigoth's. His arms were scrolled with tattoos of daggers dripping blood, helmeted skulls, swastikas, a naked woman in a biker cap chained by the wrists to motorcycle handlebars. The three people in the booth looked at nothing, their hands and bodies motionless, their mouths moving slightly, as though they did not know which expression they wanted their faces to form.

"Excuse me, but you were pinning my friends," the biker said. "Then I got the impression you cracked wise about something. Like your shit don't stink, like other people ain't worthy of respect. I just want you to know we ain't got no beef with nobody. Ain't no biker here gonna hurt you. Everybody cool with that?"

The two men in the booth started to nod imperceptibly, as though their acquiescence would open a door in an airless, superheated room. But the biker was watching the woman.

"You want another beer?" he asked her. He reached out with one finger and touched her lips. "Smile for me. Come on, you got a nice mouth. You don't want to walk around with a pout on it."

Her throat swallowed and her eyes were shiny, her nostrils dilated and white on the edges.

"Here, let me show you," the biker said. He worked his finger into her mouth, wedging it open, forcing it past her teeth, reaching inside her cheek.

"Now, just a minute," the man next to her said.

"You don't want to touch me, Jack. That's something you really don't want to do," the biker said, while the woman's saliva ran down his finger.

Doc stepped into the biker's field of vision, raising his hand as a peacemaker might.

"You need to walk outside and get some air, trooper… No, no, it's not up for debate," Doc said.

The biker didn't speak. Instead, his left hand, the index finger still wet from the woman's mouth, seemed to float like a balloon toward the side of Doc's head, as though he were about to caress it.

Doc's movements were so fast I was never sure later whether he hit the biker first with his hand or his foot. I saw him spin, then the biker's head snapped back and his mouth exploded in the air. Doc spun again, his foot flying out in a reverse back kick, and I was sure this time I heard bones or teeth snap.

The biker was on the floor now, and I could see spittle and blood on his lips. But his pain and disfigurement were the least of his problems. He was strangling to death.

"Get out of the way!" I heard Cleo say behind me. Then she was on her knees by the biker, pressing his tongue down with a spoon, reaching into his windpipe with her fingers, extracting part of a dental bridge.

I walked outside, past the row of parked Harleys, and removed L.Q. Navarro's blue-black, holstered.45 from the shell on the back of my pickup truck. I dropped the pistol on the front seat and waited for the sheriff's deputies and the paramedics, who I knew would be there momentarily. The sky was black, the mountains steep-sided, the trees suddenly pale green when lightning jumped between the clouds. Down the highway I saw the red emergency lights of an ambulance roaring toward me inside a vortex of rain.

Nailed to a telephone pole was a drenched, wind-torn poster advertising a rodeo in Stevensville, down in the Bitterroot Valley. On the ad was an action photo of a rodeo clown distracting a bull that had just thrown a cowboy into the boards. For some reason the incongruous image of the helpful clown, dressed in vagabond clothes, wearing a derby hat with horns attached to it, would not leave my mind.

Two DAYS LATER I drove west of Missoula, past the U.S. Forest Service smoke-jumper school, then up a sharp grade between wooded mountains into a long green valley ringed by more mountains. I looked at the map Doc had drawn for me and drove across the Jocko River and followed a dirt road between two bald hills to the gated entrance of Cleo Lonnigan's property.

The morning was still cold. Smoke blew from the stone chimney of her house, and horses were standing in the sun by a barn that was wet on one side with melting frost.

I walked up on the porch and knocked on the door and removed my hat when she answered it.

"I wanted to apologize for speaking ineptly about your loss. Doc told me about it later," I said.

"That's why you drove all the way out here?" she asked.

"More or less."

There was no screen on the door. She stood perhaps a foot from me but had not asked me in, so that the space between us and her lack of hospitality were even more awkward.

"How's Doc?" she asked.

"The biker didn't file charges, so the cops let Doc slide. I guess getting your face bashed in is just part of an evening out here."

"Pacifists in Montana get about the same respect as vegetarians and gay rights advocates," she said. "You saved that biker's life," I said. She looked at me without replying, as though examining my words for manipulation or design.

I fitted on my Stetson and glanced around at the sunlight on her pasture and her horses drinking in a creek that was lined with aspens and cottonwoods.

"Can I take you for breakfast in town?" I asked.

"Doc says you were a Texas Ranger."

"Yeah, before I got hurt. I started off as a city cop in Houston."

She seemed to look past me, into the distance. "I have some coffee on the stove," she said.

Her house was built of lacquered pine, with big windows that looked out on the hills and cathedral ceilings and heavy plank furniture inside and stone fireplaces and pegs in the walls for hats and coats. In the kitchen she poured a cup of coffee for me in a white mug. Out back two llamas were grazing in a lot that was nubbed down to the dirt, and, farther on, up a hill that was still golden with winter grass, a whitetail doe with two fawns stood on the edge of a deep green stand of Douglas fir.

"Are you and Doc pretty tight?" I said, my face deliberately blank.

"Sometimes. In his own mind Doc's still married."

"I don't see Doc in your support group," I said.

"Why?"

"His wife died in an accident. I suspect most people in your group have lost relatives to criminal acts."

"Doc's wife worked for the utility company. They made her fly to Colorado in bad weather. He blames them for her death."

"I never heard him say that," I said.

"Sometimes if you confess your real thoughts, people will be afraid of you," she replied.

But I knew she was talking about herself now and not Doc. He had told me about her husband, a stockbroker from San Francisco who had taken early retirement and bought a ranch in the Jocko Valley six years ago. He and Cleo'd had a six-year-old son. Their lives should have been idyllic. Instead, there were rumors about infidelity and money-laundering back in San Francisco. The husband filed for divorce, accusing his wife of adultery, and won summer visitation rights with his son. He moved to Coeur d'Alene and each June came back to Montana and picked up his boy.

On a July Fourth weekend two years ago, the father's and the son's bodies had been found in the trunk of the father's automobile on the Clearwater National Forest. The automobile had been burned.