James Burke - Bitterroot

An hour later, while Temple was in the shower, the phone rang on the nightstand.

"This is the front desk. Was Ms. Carrol expecting a guest?" a young man's voice said.

"Not that I know of. Is something wrong?" I said. "A man cruised through the lot twice. He stopped by your door. He backed up and down, like he was trying to see through the window."

"What kind of car did this guy have?"

"You can see for yourself. He's parked across the street. In a red car with the radiator showing."

I went outside and walked to the edge of the street and looked through the traffic into the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. Wyatt Dixon stared back at me from behind his steering wheel. His face was mirthless, the idiot's grin gone, his features like dried putty. He threw whatever he was eating out the window, onto the pavement, and started his engine and rumbled into the street. He turned his head and stared at me for only a second, but I think I saw the real Wyatt Dixon for the first time. The downturned mouth, the hollow eyes, the sensual flesh that had hardened against the facial bones, were like a Stygian image from a dream suddenly released into daylight.

Temple walked up behind me and glanced up and down the street.

"Who was that?" she asked.

"A guy who's been looking for a bullet a long time," I said.

On the way home, passing through the little town of Victor, Wyatt Dixon saw Carl Hinkel's truck parked in front of the barbershop. Wyatt Dixon pulled into the grocery down the street and bought a half-gallon container of ice cream and sat bare-chested on the high sidewalk in the shade of a tack and feed store and ate the ice cream with a metal spoon. It was a fine day, the mountains shining in the sun, the breeze cool on Wyatt's skin. But he couldn't enjoy it, not even the ice cream that slid in cold lumps down his throat. One obsession had haunted all his thoughts, ruined his sleep, woke him in the morning like a vulture on his bedpost, and tainted every moment and pleasure in his day.

The woman at the clinic had given him both an oral and a blood test. But it would be three weeks before he could receive even tentative assurance that he was not HIV positive, and the nurse had said something about an incubation period that would delay any certain knowledge of his status for another three months.

Wyatt wanted to tear Terry Witherspoon apart. But that was too easy. Terry expected abuse, got high on it, and used it to feed his bitchiness. Wyatt had special plans for Terry, a date with destiny that'd make him wish his mama had stuffed him hot and smoking down the family honey hole. But in the meantime he had plenty of substitutes to do a number on. Mr. Holland and his girlfriend were ripe for some fine-tuning and that war hero, Dr. Voss, could use straightening out as well. But right now Wyatt's mind was on Carl, who had convinced all his neighbors he was a stomp-ass paratrooper. Right.

Carl came out of the barbershop, his boots shined, his seersucker slacks pressed, a Stetson at a rakish angle on his head, his western-cut coat puffing open in the wind.

Wyatt cleaned off his spoon in his mouth and dropped off the high sidewalk into the street and stuck the spoon down into the side pocket of his jeans. Carl stood in the shade of the nineteenth-century brick-front buildings and gazed at the Bitterroots rising up out of pastureland into the sky. Always posing as the patriarch, Wyatt thought, the gentleman rancher who turned no patriot from his door, the prophet who gave voice to folks who'd had their rights stolen by the government.

Maybe it was time Carl got a lesson in humbleness.

Wyatt squeezed his scrotum and started toward the barbershop, when a maroon Cadillac convertible and a tan Honda pulled up on each side of Carl's truck and four greaseballs got out and approached Carl with smiles on their faces, like they were all old friends. The greaseballs formed a circle around him, a couple of them glancing over their shoulders to see if anyone had taken notice, Carl flinching in the middle of the circle like one of the greaseballs was about to pop him in the face.

Well, ain't this a pistol? Wyatt thought. He removed a toothpick from his hatband and leaned back against the coolness of the elevated sidewalk and cleaned his fingernails while Carl was bundled into the Honda. For just an instant Carl seemed to look between two of the men pushing him into the backseat and see Wyatt watching him. Wyatt laughed to himself and slipped the toothpick into his mouth and walked up the cement steps into the grocery store, past the sign that said no shirt, no shoes, no service, and pulled a six-pack of beer from the cooler and paid the clerk.

Outside the store window, one of the greaseballs got into Carl's truck and started it up, then the truck, the Honda, and the maroon convertible pulled onto the highway and caravanned toward Stevensville.

Wyatt walked back outside and ripped the tab off a can of beer and drank the can half empty, leaning over so the foam would not run down his bare chest. The mountains were a deep blue-green now, the valley floor as golden as the inside of a whiskey barrel. Wyatt stepped aside for an overweight woman and removed his hat.

"Howdy do, ma'am. Would you set out here and drink a beer with a rodeo cowboy that has been blown away by your beauty?" he said.

"Excuse me?" she said.

He squeezed her bottom and left her stunned and outraged on the sidewalk.

But Wyatt's mind was already on other things. He crushed his beer can in his hand and tossed it into the street and fired his car up. A man shouldn't have to die if he loved the world as much as Wyatt did, he thought. Brought down by a piece of queer bait who couldn't pick a half sack of cotton without a diagram. He wanted to rip the steering wheel off the column. Instead, he drove slowly down the street, waving good-bye to the woman he had violated on the sidewalk.

It took me several hours to get the sheriff on the phone.

"Say all this again," he said.

"Dixon was cruising the parking area in front of Temple Carrol's room. Then he stationed himself across the street so he could watch the motel. He left when I went outside."

"Seems a bad time for him to be making a move," the sheriff said.

"Dixon doesn't consult with a psychiatrist before he hurts people."

"Something else is going on, ain't it?"

"He thinks he might have AIDS."

"I hate to even ask how you know this."

"I wrote him a letter and gave him a few speculations to study on."

There was a long silence.

"You know anything about Carl Hinkel being kidnapped?" he said.

"No."

"He went to Victor to get his hair cut. A fellow with him went inside the bar to shoot pool. He says when he come out a little boy told him a bunch of men threw Hinkel in a car and took off with him."

"Boy, that breaks me up."

"You been putting glass in these people's heads, Mr. Holland. Now it's done turned around on you. I don't want to listen to your whining."

"You left Dixon on the street, Sheriff. If he comes around me or mine, I'm going to kill him."

"Oh, I'm sure you will. You stay home today. You stay away from these people. And you stay out of my business," the sheriff said. His voice was like a heated wire when he hung up the receiver.

Terry Witherspoon had taken two showers that afternoon but couldn't get clean. As soon as he dried himself and put his clothes on, a smell like soiled kitty litter rose from his armpits. He tried to eat a can of Vienna sausages and vomited in the backyard.

He had never been so frightened in his life.

Wyatt had said seven o'clock. Terry wiped his face and mouth with a soiled towel and looked at the slanting rays of the sun through the pines, the flecks of gold on the river's surface down below, the bats that were already flying through the evening shadows.