James Burke - Bitterroot

"Go away where?"

She gave up.

"Don't get around Wyatt," she said. "Dr. Voss just humiliated Terry in front of a bunch of college kids. Terry is Wyatt's punk. That means Wyatt has to hurt somebody so Terry can feel he's important again. That's the way they do things inside."

"Who cares what these guys do? They're scum… Stop backing away from me."

But she was running now, in her moccasins and halter and shorts that were dirty in the rump, and for some reason she made him think of a frightened doe bolting through a forest where the trees took no note of the wild beating of its heart.

Two hours later Lucas, Temple, Doc, Maisey and I loaded up in Temple's Explorer, drowsy on beer and from sitting in the sun, the encounter with Terry Witherspoon pushed out of our minds, the summer evening still blue and pink and filled with promise.

As we snaked our way out of the parking area, I looked through the haze of dust and saw Wyatt Dixon in front of the white camper, dancing with Sue Lynn slung over his shoulder like a side of beef. When she tried to raise her torso erect, he slapped her rump and danced faster and faster in a circle, his knees jerking upward like an Indian's while the Confederate flag flapped over his head.

Lucas was sitting next to me in the backseat. His eyes started to follow mine.

"Look at the eagles up on the hill," I said.

"Where?" he said.

"They're flying right above the trees, right across the canyon," I said.

He looked at the canyon, then out the rear window of the vehicle.

"Was something going on back there?" he asked.

"Nothing that we can change," I said.

The next day was Sunday. That afternoon Sue Lynn sat on top of a boulder behind Wyatt's log house and watched him and Terry smoke homegrown gage and flip a hatchet end over end into a cottonwood tree. Wyatt had said nothing to her about her relationship with Lucas, nor had he tried to put moves on her last night or this morning. In fact, he gave her a blanket and pillow and told her to sleep on the deerhide couch in his house and said he would sleep in the bedroom. When she woke in the morning, he fixed coffee and eggs for her and whistled a tune while he did it, his bare triangular back turned to her, as though he were both indifferent to the coldness of the predawn hour and the presence of several loaded firearms that hung on antler racks which she could easily take down and discharge if she chose.

But she knew Wyatt and the way he thought, if "thought" was the proper word to use. He never did what others expected. Unlike Carl Hinkel and his shaved-head windups, Wyatt seemed to be possessed by no ideological passion. His war was not with the government or with people of a different race. His war was with humanity, or better yet, the normality that defined most human beings. Wyatt was like the virus that immediately recognizes the antibodies in an immune system as its enemy. He used and ingested people. He did it with an idiot's grin, eating his own pain, demeaning and degrading his adversaries in ways that often took them days to figure out.

From a good thirty feet Wyatt threw the hatchet into the tree trunk, thunking it so solidly into the wood the handle trembled with a sound like a sprung saw blade. He worked the steel head out of the bark and extended the handle to Terry, then jerked it back, smiling, when Terry tried to take it.

Then he repeated the maneuver, teasing Terry, jumping around sideways as though he had springs on his feet. But before Terry could go into a pout, Wyatt slipped the handle into Terry's palm and clasped his hand affectionately on the back of Terry's neck and pulled the roach Terry was smoking off his lips and took two hits off it, then pinched off the ash and ate it.

"Roll us another one, Sue Lynn," Terry said.

Roll it yourself, fuckhead, she thought.

But she didn't say it. Not with Wyatt there. He might bitch-slap Terry or force him to wear makeup and throw him from an automobile, but when push came to shove, with either Carl or any of the other lamebrains who hung around the compound, Terry was Wyatt's mainline bar of soap and nobody made remarks about him or put their hands on him except Wyatt.

So she rolled a joint from the home-grown marijuana in Wyatt's tobacco pouch and licked down the glue on the seam of the cigarette paper and crimped down the ends while Wyatt went inside the log house to use the toilet.

Terry pulled the joint from her fingers and put it into his mouth. He was bare-chested and his pants hung two inches below his belly button. Dirt rings clung to his neck like a necklace of insects.

"Light it for me," he said.

She ignored him and slid off the boulder and walked down toward the river, dusting off her rump, working a pack of cigarettes out of her jeans, sticking one into her mouth.

"I can have your ass if I want," he said behind her.

He traced his fingernail down her spine to her panties.

She tried to bite down on the words that welled out of her throat but it was too late. "Your mother must have thought she gave birth to a tumor," she said.

He took her book of matches from her hand and lit the joint, holding the hit deep down in his lungs, and bounced the dead match off her face.

"Have a nice day, Sue Lynn," he said.

Later, she went inside the log house and lay on the couch, a blanket wrapped around her head, and tried to sleep. But it was no use. One of Wyatt's buddies was running a dirt bike up and down an adjacent hill, gunning the engine through the trees, scouring humus and rock and grass into the air, filling the softness of the evening with a sound like a chain saw grinding on steel pipe.

Why not eighty-six it, like Lucas said? she thought.

Because Amos Rackley told her she stayed on the job until she found out what kinds of weapons were in Carl Hinkel's basement. Maybe she should have worn the wire, she thought. Now she had no umbilical cord to the outside.

What Amos Rackley could not comprehend, what he would not hear, was the fact that Carl Hinkel could look inside people's heads. He saw where they were weak, the thoughts they tried to hide, the flare of ambition in their eyes. He understood evil in others, tolerated it the way a father does an errant child, and used it for his own ends. His followers all knew they could deceive themselves or lie to the world and Carl would remain their friend. But they dared not lie to him.

He seemed to have no sexual interest in either women or men. His pastime was his absorption with the Internet. He sat for hours in front of his computer, his features wrapped with the green glow of his monitor, while he tapped on the keys and addressed chat rooms filled with his admirers.

But she had seen one peculiarity in his commitment to his computer. In nice weather he left the door open to his little stone office, and anyone in the compound could see him at his desk, puffing clouds of white smoke from his cob pipe, his back as straight as a bayonet, while his fingers danced across the keyboard. But sometimes he would shut the door and slide the wood crossbar into place, and everyone understood that Carl was not to be disturbed.

Once a new member at the compound, a jug-eared kid just out of the Wyoming pen, called Shortening Bread behind his back because of his dark skin, wanted to curry favor with Carl and made lunch for him and carried it on a tray to the office. Unfortunately for Shortening Bread, Carl had not quite secured the crossbar on the door, and Shortening Bread worked his foot into the jamb and pushed the door back and started to step inside the office without asking permission.

Carl rose from his chair and flung the tray into the yard. When Shortening Bread broke into tears, Carl put his arm over his shoulders and walked with him around the compound, explaining the need for discipline among members of the Second American Revolution, reassuring him that he was a valuable man.