James Burke - Bitterroot

"I can't abide a soldier sassing me like that, Wyatt,* Carl said.

"Is that right?" Wyatt said, without looking up from the sandwich he was making.

"You were out of line, son," Carl said.

Wyatt filled the side of a butter knife with mustard and layered it on his sandwich bread, nodding, as though digesting a profound statement.

"Would you hand me those 'maters, Carl?" he said.

Carl gestured to a boy behind the steam table, who picked up a platter of sliced tomatoes and tried to give them to Wyatt. Wyatt ignored him.

"You got what some folks might call a serious character defect, Carl. You cain't cut it on your own. That's why the airborne run you off. That's why you got to surround yourself with a bunch of sawed-off little pissants don't know their own mind. Now get the fuck out of my face."

At DAWN Friday morning Terry woke in his shack above the Clark Fork and saw Wyatt standing against the window, inside the shack, the blue-green softness of the pines and the mists off the river rising up behind him. The fire in the woodstove had gone out and the room was cold, the air brittle. Terry hugged the quilt around him and sat up on his bunk. The German dagger Carl had given him lay on the table in the center of the room, the swastikas on the white handle as bright as drops of blood.

"I knowed a preacher who used to say, 'Fool me oncet, shame on you. Fool me twicet, shame on me,'" Wyatt said. He wore a heavy long-sleeve crimson shirt, with his purple garters on the arms, and tight jeans and his flat-brimmed black hat with the Indian band around the crown.

"I don't know what I did wrong, Wyatt. I don't know why you're mad at me."

Wyatt picked up the dagger and eased it halfway out of the sheath. The chromed blade clicked with light. Why hadn't he put the knife under his pillow? Terry thought. Why did Wyatt have to put his filthy hands on it?

"Carl promoted you?" Wyatt said.

"I'm information officer, if you want to know."

"Going over to Idaho? Meet all them groups at Hayden Lake?"

"Maybe. If Carl tells me to."

Wyatt sat down in a chair and fiddled with the German dagger, never removing it all the way from the sheath. Then he tossed it to Terry.

"I noticed you been coughing a bit. I'm gonna introduce you to a woman used to be a whore down by the railway tracks," Wyatt said. "Why do I want to meet her?"

"She thinks she might know you from the clinic. You call to mind a woman looks like she was just dug up from a cemetery?"

"I don't know what's going on, Wyatt."

"I'll pick you up at seven. Maybe we'll check out the Voss girl again. Or maybe that female private detective. I told Mr. Holland he'd know when it was my ring."

"Carl says it's a bad time for stirring anything up." "Seven o'clock," Wyatt said.

THAT SAME MORNING Temple and I ate breakfast together in a cafe across from the train yard, then walked down Higgins toward the river. Two city police cars had pulled up in front of a saloon, their flashers on, and two uniformed officers had gotten out and were approaching a man who sat like a pile of wet hay on the curb. The officers slipped their batons into the rings on their belts and leaned over and tried to talk with the man on the curb.

It was one of those moments when, if your life is fairly sane and you're able to greet the day with a clear eye and enjoy the simple pleasure of reading the newspaper over a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal, you thank the Creator or Yahweh or the Great Spirit or the Buddha or Our Lord Jesus you are not the wretch whose fate seems so awful that no reasonable human being could deliberately choose it for himself.

Xavier Girard's clothes looked as if they had been stolen off a washline. His face was puffed, his eyes like sliced beets; his mouth hung open as though he had just witnessed a train wreck. He vomited between his legs, then stared stupidly at the splatter on his tennis shoes.

But even from across the street and in his drunken state Xavier recognized me and pushed himself out of the policemen's grasp and stumbled into the traffic, where he was almost hit by a milk truck.

He came toward me, waving his arms, a vinegary stench welling up from his armpits.

"Molinari's goons ripped up all my disks. These fucks won't do anything about it," he said, swinging one arm backward to indicate the two policemen who had followed him into the street.

"They look like decent guys. Talk it over with them later," I said.

"Fuck 'decent.' Tell Molinari my new book is titled The Cuckold Shoves His Horns Through the Greaseball's Heart," Xavier said.

The two policemen got him by each arm again and walked him back across the street, then one of them recrossed the street and stepped up on the curb.

"You know this guy?" he asked.

"Yep."

"We got a full house. You want to take care of him?" he said.

"Nope," I said.

"I had a feeling you might say that."

Later, Temple and I went back to her motel. I sat in a stuffed chair and turned on CNN while she went into the bath and brushed her teeth. When she came out I noticed she had taken off her earrings and her gold watch and the barrette from her hair. The blinds were closed but the sunlight glowed around the edges of the slats and touched her face and accentuated the girl-like quality of her mouth and the mysterious beauty of her eyes, which I had never understood, no more than you can understand the strange hold a tree-shaded green river can have on you, the way that its depths, the thickness of its color, and the warmth of its current can swell above your loins and arouse an undefined longing in you that makes you feel you do not know who you really are.

I stood up from the chair and removed a small blue velvet box from my pocket.

"What's that?" she asked.

"I happened to be passing by the jewelry store yesterday and this caught my eye."

She looked up at me, and I saw the color grow in her cheeks and her face become smaller and her eyes fix mine in such a way that I could hardly look back at the box in my hand.

I opened the top against the stiffness of the spring and removed the ring and lifted her hand and put the ring on her finger and slipped it over the knuckle and folded her fingers down into her palm.

"You can take it back if it doesn't fit. Or, if you don't want it, we can just return it and get a refund," I said.

"Get a refund?"

"Yeah, I sort of did this without taking a vote."

She pushed one loafer off, then the other, and stood on top of my feet and tilted her head sideways and closed her eyes and placed her mouth on mine. Then her arms were around my neck and she tightened her stomach and breasts against me, and when she took her mouth away from mine her eyes were open, as though she doubted her power to take my heart. I kissed her again and ran my hands down her back and breathed the fragrance of her hair and skin and the perfume on her neck. I took off her blouse and unbuttoned her jeans and pulled back the bedspread and laid her down on the sheets and removed her socks and worked her jeans off her legs and sat beside her and kissed her breasts, her nipples, her throat, her eyes and cheeks, her baby fat, her back, her hair, then I stroked the inside of her thighs and traced her sex and the smooth taper of her stomach and hips and the perfect lines of her breasts.

"Billy Bob?" she said.

"What?"

"Do you want to take off your clothes?"

I undressed and lay beside her, then I looked once more into the green mystery of her eyes and I finally knew what it was that made her eyes different from any other woman's on Earth. Their depth had no bottom; they went straight into the soul, and they contained no guile, no fear, no regret, and no doubt about the intentions of her heart. I leaned over and took one of her nipples into my mouth and worked my palm under the small of her back and entered the space between her thighs, where her hand received my sex and placed it inside her while her mouth parted and only a whisper of sound came out. Then I was inside Temple Carrol again, the feathery touch of her breath against my cheek, her fingers deep into my back, and I felt the two of us slip as one into a valley of buttercups and green grass and sun showers that she had created for both of us simply by widening her thighs and raising her knees and turning her face like a new flower up to mine.