James Burke - Bitterroot

If he had a car, he would run. If he had a phone, he would ring Carl. But he was trapped in an eighty-buck-a-month shack that was worse than the shack he grew up in, at the mercy of Wyatt and his craziness. Where had everything gone wrong? Why had Maisey treated him the way she did? Why did a Mobbed-up guy like Nicki Molinari, a real player on the Coast, want to beat the shit out of him over a kid and his father getting killed on the Clearwater National Forest?

Terry's head throbbed.

He went out into the railed dirt lot behind the shack and stood listening to the sounds of birds in the trees, the crack of a stick under a deer's hoof, the tumble of water in the river down below, the muttering of an owl up a larch that was shaggy and black with moss.

Nobody could be this alone, he thought. These feelings would pass. Maybe it was just a stomach virus. He wasn't a coward. Ask the queens he'd beaten cross-eyed with a sock full of sand.

Down the road he heard Wyatt's car coming hard, the engine roaring, rocks ricocheting like bullets under the fenders. Terry's throat trembled when he took a breath. If he only had the.22 rifle. But that damn lawyer had splintered it across a tree trunk.

He faced the road just as Wyatt turned into the yard, a cloud of cinnamon-colored dust drifting across his car into the light that slanted through the pines.

Wyatt cut the engine and stepped out on the ground in a new pair of striped black trousers, a hand-tooled belt with a gold bucking horse embossed on the huge silver buckle, a heavy, long-sleeve, snap-button cotton shirt, a new white Stetson with a gray feather in the band, a shined pair of oxblood Tony Lamas powdered with dust. He had just shaved and rubbed talcum on his neck and cologne on his cheeks, and for some reason he looked more handsome than Terry had ever seen him.

"You ready to ride?" Wyatt asked.

"You say an Indian woman knows me from the clinic?"

"Don't worry about that now. You know ole Carl disappeared? Too bad that happened just after he promoted you."

"Disappeared?"

"He'll probably turn up. I got a chore for you tonight."

"What?"

"You're gonna do the Voss girl. Then we're both gonna do that lawyer."

"No, sir," Terry said, shaking his head, one hand on the top rail of the fence, his eyes averted.

"Say that again."

"The ATF and the FBI are all over the place, Wyatt."

"That's when they least expect it. I got it all planned. Get in the car."

Wyatt removed his hat and combed his hair and waited, his manner casual, the setting sun pink on the taut surfaces of his face. Then Terry knew, without any doubt, that if he got into the car with Wyatt, he would be driven to a place in the woods from which he would never return.

"I'm staying home tonight," he said.

Wyatt grinned and approached him.

"Terry, you never could figure out when good things was happening in your life. That Indian woman I was talking about? I showed her a picture of me and you just a little while ago. She seen you in the clinic, all right, but you was in there to get fixed up after them greaseballs stuck you in the batting cage. It's time to have some fun."

What Wyatt had said to him made no sense at all. Wyatt was walking closer to him now, rolling an unlit cigar in his mouth with his fingers, his eyes possessed of a curious gleam, as though he were both amused by Terry and enjoying a fantasy about Terry's immediate fate.

He pinched Terry's sleeve, tugging slightly on the cloth.

"Don't wrinkle your nose at me, boy. Hop in the car. You're gonna like it," he said.

"I got to go to the bathroom first," Terry said.

He walked down the fence line toward the shack, tapping his hand on the top rail. His single-bladed pocketknife was stuck at a forty-five-degree angle in the corner post, where he had thrown it that morning. He reached out and grasped it by the wood handle, hefted it once so that the blade dropped across the calloused cup of his fingers, then whirled, whipping his arm backward, flinging the knife into Wyatt's chest.

Wyatt stared at him stupidly, then grabbed the top fence rail with one hand and fitted his other around the knife's handle. His lips formed a cone and he sucked air in and out of his mouth, as though a piece of dry ice were burning his tongue. He tried to pull the knife from his chest, but Terry pushed it in deeper, bending it sideways to widen the wound, hammering the flat of his fist on the knife's butt like a man driving a spike into wood.

Terry felt the blade snap off at the hilt, felt himself lose balance, then realized he was only inches from Wyatt's face now, staring into Wyatt's eyes, the broken handle of the knife clenched impotently in his palm, his fingers warm with Wyatt's blood, his whole life laid out behind him like a railroad track that had brought him to this particular moment and place, his heart bursting with the terrible knowledge that he had only seconds to remove himself from Wyatt's reach.

Then Wyatt's left hand seized his throat and lifted him up into a vortex of sunlit pine needles and blue sky and mountain peaks that were so high no air existed on their slopes.

That night Temple stayed at Doc's and I gave her my bunk bed and slept in the tent by the river with Lucas. During the night I heard rain on the canvas and the pop of lightning on the ridges, then the dawn broke clear and cool and deer were grazing in the pasture behind Doc's barn when I opened the tent flap in the morning.

Lucas had already built a fire and made coffee. He squatted down and filled a tin cup for me and added canned milk to it and handed it to me, then looked thoughtfully at the smoke drifting out on the water.

"You can make a fellow nervous sleeping with that dadburn gun," he said.

"Next time I'll leave it somewhere else," I said.

"Doc's gonna get out of his troubles?"

"I think so."

"Then let the law take care of all them bad people out there."

"It doesn't work that way, bud. When you're the victim of a violent crime, most of the time you're on your own."

"I ain't gonna argue. You're a lot smarter than me. Can you loan me two thousand dollars?"

"What?"

"I signed up at the University of Montana for the fall semester. I got to pay out-of-state tuition."

"If it's for your education, it's not a loan. You know that."

"Thanks, Billy Bob. Me and Dogus are going upstream. I'll catch you later," he said.

He picked up his fly rod and creel and slung his fly vest over his shoulder. He and the mongrel dog walked through the trees to a white, pebbly stretch of shoreline where the water had receded and Lucas could back-cast without hanging his fly in the trees.

If indeed I was smarter than my son, I thought, why did I feel I had just been had?

When I walked up the slope, Doc opened the front door and tossed me the portable phone.

"Tell this guy to work on his speaking skills. He's a little incoherent," he said.

"Which guy?"

"The sheriff."

I put the receiver to my ear.

"Hello?" I said.

"What'd be say?" the sheriff asked.

"Sorry, I wasn't listening," I replied.

"Then you'd better listen to this. We just pulled Terry Witherspoon out of a tree. He's alive but that's about all. His back's broken. Guess who did it to him?"

"Wyatt Dixon?"

"Witherspoon left a knife blade in Dixon's chest. He says Dixon has plans for you and the Voss girl and Ms. Carrol."

"Thanks for telling us."

"You're responsible for all this bullshit, Mr. Holland. I hope you can sleep at night."

"Like a stone. Good-bye, sir," I said, and clicked off the phone.

But my lie hung in my throat.

An hour later Holly Girard drove a hand-waxed, fire-engine-red Corvette across the field behind the house and came to a stop two feet short of the front steps and got out and slammed the door behind her. Her hair was blown into a tangle on her head, her face red with windburn around her brown-tinted aviator's glasses.