James Burke - Bitterroot

"You quote Nicki Molinari to me about my son? You worthless piece of Southern garbage," she said.

"Adios," I said, and got into my truck. While I ground the starter I could feel her eyes pulling the skin from my bones.

That same evening Sue Lynn Big Medicine drove her uncle's pickup truck into the Jocko Valley and onto the Flathead Indian Reservation. She passed the rodeo and powwow grounds and followed a dirt road into the hills, climbing higher into trees and deep shadows and outcroppings of gray rock that were marbled with lichen.

She pulled off the road into a flat, thinly wooded area by a creek. The remains of an abandoned sweat lodge stood next to the creek, the concave network of shaved willow limbs hung with strips of rotting canvas. She cut the engine and walked down to the water and leaned against a rock and smoked a cigarette and waited. It was not long before she heard a four-wheel-drive vehicle grinding in low gear up the road.

The man who had told her where to wait for him got out of his vehicle and walked toward her. He wore slip-on, half-topped boots and khakis and a long-sleeve blue cotton shirt and a bill cap. His hair was neatly clipped, and even though it was evening he was freshly shaved and smelled of the lotion on his jaws.

"Did I keep you waiting long?" Amos Rackley asked.

"I wasn't doing anything else," she said, inhaling her cigarette, her chin raised, her gaze averted.

"Where's your uncle's race car, the one with numbers on it?"

"It doesn't have lights."

He seemed to look at her kindly but for just a second his eyes would focus on her mouth and drop to her throat and breasts.

"I have a folder here with some pictures of guns in it," he said. "I want you to look at the pictures and tell me if you've seen any of these guns inside Carl Hinkel's house."

He opened the folder on top of the rock she was leaning against and shone a tiny flashlight on a series of glossy prints. She felt the hair on his forearm touch hers.

"I don't know anything about guns," she said.

"A gal from the Res? Who grew up around hunters? That's hard to believe, Sue Lynn."

"I don't know what kind of guns Carl Hinkel has. They're guns."

"I see. We need you to go back into Hinkel's house," he said, closing the folder.

"They're on to me."

"I don't think that's true. They're just a suspicious lot by nature. Call up Wyatt and tell him you had a fight with the Holland boy and you want to see him again."

"I don't want to ever be alone with Wyatt again. You don't know what he-"

"We'll be close by," Rackley said, interrupting her.

"You'll be wearing a wire. Your job's almost done." He moved his hand slightly and let his fingers cover the tops of hers.

"I can't do it," she said.

"Do what? Can't do what, Sue Lynn?"

She wanted to pull her hand away from his but couldn't. She could feel her own heart beating, her chest rising and falling inside her shirt.

"I hate you. I hate all you people," she said.

She felt his hand leave hers. The wind was cold on the back of her neck and she felt her hair feathering on her cheeks. She wanted to turn and stare him down but all she could do was fix her eyes on the desiccated remains of the sweat lodge and the discarded heat stones that had been blackened by long-dead fires.

"I'm disappointed to hear you say that, Sue Lynn. I'll call you very soon. You're going to be a big help to us. You'll see."

After Amos Rackley was gone, she sat on the creek bank with her knees drawn up in front of her, her hands clasped on her ankles. The light was gone from the sky now and she heard animals moving about in the woods, deer certainly, perhaps black bears and cougars, perhaps even a moose, and she hoped if she saw the latter she would not be afraid, even though the moose was considered a man-killer. She wanted to believe the animals represented the spirits of her ancestors, people who lived in harmony with the earth and sky and wind and the water in the streams and all the winged and four-footed creatures and the salmon who swam all the way back from the sea to lay their roe where they had been born, that maybe the animals she heard in the darkness came bearing an omen of power and resolution and courage that daily eluded her and translated her sleep into a prison filled with grotesque shapes she could not control.

She rose from the ground and waded into the stream and felt its coldness swell over her ankles. She walked up the opposite bank, across small stones that hurt her feet, and entered the tree line. Again she heard the noise in the brush and she walked farther into the woods until she entered an old clear-cut that was dotted with toadstools and tree stumps that had gone gray with rot. A bull elk reared its head out of the grass, its rack clattering with moonlight.

For a moment she thought she had found the totem that spoke of the power her people could pass on to her. But instead she stared at the elk's rack, the ridged texture and hardness of the horn, the curved points, and all she could think of was Wyatt Dixon. And she knew she would not sleep that night.

In the grayness of the following dawn I sat by Lucas's fire on the riverbank and listened to Sue Lynn tell her story. The wind blew ashes out of the fire ring and they settled on her shoulders and in her hair like snowflakes. While she spoke she squeezed one hand on top of the other and her eyes seemed to look into a place that neither Lucas nor I occupied.

"Are you going to wear a wire?" I asked.

"No, not around Carl. He scares me. Even more than Wyatt does. He's a lot smarter than Wyatt," she answered.

"I think it's time you got out from under these guys, Sue Lynn," I said.

"Why did Mr. Rackley want to know about the guns?" she said.

"If you saw automatic weapons in Hinkel's house, Rackley could get a warrant and hit the place. You didn't see any heavy stuff in there?"

"There's a rack of guns in the basement. Bikers call them 'pogo sticks,'" she said.

"Those are either M-16s or AR-15s. The AR-15s are legal. The others aren't. You're not sure which they are?" I said.

"I think that gun stuff is for dipshits," she said. She stood up from the rock she was sitting on and looked into the mist that shrouded the trees and at the river that flowed like satin over the boulders in the deepest part of the current.

"Lucas, I could never drink coffee without a little milk in it. Do you mind?" I said.

"Since you put it as subtle as a slap in the face with a dead cat, no, Billy Bob, I don't mind," he replied, and rose to his feet and walked up the bank and across the porch into Doc's house.

"Your little brother was abducted and murdered, wasn't he?" I said.

She stood above me, one foot resting on a rock, her thumbs in her pockets. I could see the pulse beating in her throat.

"Who told you that?" she said. "The night Lamar Ellison died, he was marinated on beer and weed in a tavern up the Blackfoot. He had a blackout of some kind and said something that made you very angry."

"I don't remember that," she said. "Doc goes on trial in a couple of weeks. Do you think he should be on trial, Sue Lynn?"

"I came here because Lucas asked me to. Stop questioning me. You're not a policeman."

"Doc's inside. Come on in and talk with him." Her eyes were watering now. She stepped away from the fire and pretended that smoke had gotten in them. She wiped her nose on her wrist.

"You know what it's like to have no choices, to be used by everybody around you, to have nobody care when your little brother is killed? Have you ever lived like that, Mr. Holland? Tell me," she said.

Later, I sat with Temple Carrol at a picnic bench in a city park fringed with maple trees and read through the material she had amassed on Carl Hinkel.