James Burke - Bitterroot

The sky was still light but it was almost dark inside the ring of hills when I walked back to Lucas's tent. He had built a fire and had turned on his Coleman lantern and was combing his hair in a stainless steel mirror that he had hung from his tent pole. His guitar case lay by his foot.

"Is Temple staying up here tonight?" he said.

"That's right."

"He's out there, ain't he?"

"Maybe. Maybe he holed up in a canyon and died, too. Maybe nobody will ever find him."

"Doc propped his '03 behind the kitchen door," Lucas said.

"Then Wyatt Dixon had better not get in his sights."

"You aim to cool him out, don't you?"

"I wouldn't say that."

"You can go to church all you want, Billy Bob, but you don't fool nobody. You get the chance, you're gonna gun that fellow."

"Would you hold it against me?"

He slipped his comb into his back pocket and picked up his guitar case and removed his hat from the top of the tent pole and put it on his head.

"You mind if I borrow your truck?" he asked.

"You didn't answer my question," I said.

"Like you say, maybe he holed up and died in a canyon somewheres. See you later, Billy Bob. It don't matter what you do. I love you just the same," he replied.

Sunday morning Temple and I drove up the Blackfoot into the Swan Valley to look at property. The lakeside areas and the campgrounds along the river were full of picnickers and fishermen and canoeists, and we walked with a real estate agent along the shore of Swan Lake and I stood in a copse of shaggy larch that was cold with shadow and cast a wet fly out into the sunlight and watched it sink over a ledge into a pool dissected by elongated dark shapes that crisscrossed one another as quickly as arrows fired from a bow.

Something hit my leader so hard it almost jerked the Fenwick out of my hand. The line flew off my reel through the guides and the tip of my rod bent to the water's surface before I could strip more line off the reel, then suddenly the rod was weightless, the leader cut with the cleanness of a razor.

"What was that?" Temple asked.

"A big pike, I suspect," I replied.

"We have to get us a place here, Billy Bob."

"Absolutely."

I looked at the severed end of my leader. The air seemed colder in the shade now, damp, the sunlight out on the water brittle and hard.

"What's wrong?" she said.

"I don't want to leave Lucas alone," I replied.

But my anxieties about my son seemed groundless. When we got back to Doc's he was sitting on the front porch, the belly of his Martin propped across his thigh, singing,

"I wish they'd stop makin' them ole pinball machines.

They've caused me to live on crackers and sardines. "

"Everything okay, Doc?" I said in the kitchen.

"The sheriff called. He said Wyatt Dixon's car was found in a ditch the other side of the Canadian line. No sign of Dixon," he replied. He was washing dishes, with an apron tied around his waist, and his arms were wet up to the elbows.

"What's your read on it?" I asked.

"I think Dixon and General Giap would have gotten along just fine. When the NVA drew us into Khe Sanh, Sir Charles tore up Saigon."

"Maybe Dixon's not that smart," I said.

"Right," he said, and threw me a dish towel. Outside the window I saw a flock of magpies rise from the top of a cottonwood and freckle the sky.

Later we would discover he had boosted the skinned-up brown truck outside a pulp mill in Frenchtown, west of Missoula. How his own car ended up in Canada no one would ever know. But during the night Wyatt Dixon had crossed the Blackfoot above us and slept in a campground, dressing the wound in his chest, from which he had extracted the knife blade with a pair of needle-nose pliers, eating candy bars and drinking chocolate milk for strength.

He had snaked his way across Forest Service land and parked in a low spot sheltered by trees on the river and watched the front of Doc's house through binoculars, a.44 Magnum revolver on the seat, waiting until he could assess who was home and who was not.

He watched me and Temple leave and return. Then he saw Doc and Maisey come outside together and walk past Lucas and get in Doc's truck and drive through the field in back and return a few minutes later with a horse trailer they had bought from a neighbor.

Wyatt Dixon could feel himself growing weaker, see the inflammation in his wound spreading beyond the edges of the bandages on his chest. He pulled the tape loose and poured from a bottle of peroxide into the gauze. He watched the peroxide and the infection it had boiled out of the wound seep down his stomach.

Time was running out, he thought. All because he had let a jail bitch like Terry get a shank in him. Maybe if he was that dumb he deserved to be cooled out. He shook his head in dismay and finished a carton of chocolate milk and pitched the carton out the window.

Then the moment came. Raindrops ticked on the canopy overhead and sprinkled the surface of the river with interlocking rings, as though hundreds of trout were feeding on a sudden fly hatch. Lucas stood up from the steps and put his Martin inside its case and snapped down the latches, then carried the guitar in its case down to his tent on the riverbank and got inside and pulled the flap shut. A moment later Dogus scratched on the flap and went inside, too.

Wyatt Dixon fired up his truck and floored it out of the trees, snapping the wire on a fence, scouring dirt and pinecones into the air. The steering wheel spun crazily in his hands, then he righted the truck and bore down on the tent, shifting into second gear now, the truck's body bouncing on the springs, the cleated tires thumping across rocks and driftwood.

The truck tore through Lucas's tent, splintering the poles, crushing Lucas's guitar case, blowing cook-ware and fire ashes and camp gear in all directions. But Wyatt Dixon's efforts were to no avail. While he had come powering out of the woods, he had not seen Lucas exit the opposite side of the tent with Dogus and walk down to the water's edge to cast a spinner into the riffle.

Wyatt Dixon braked the truck and stared through the back window at Lucas, who had dropped his rod and picked up a piece of driftwood the thickness and length of a baseball bat. I was out on the porch now and I saw Wyatt Dixon shift into reverse, the front of his beige shirt stained as though he had left an open bottle of Mercurochrome in his pocket. I cocked L.Q.'s revolver and fired at the truck without aiming.

The round cut a hole in the back window and exited the windshield and whined away in the woods. I gripped the revolver with two hands and steadied my arm against a post and sighted on the side of Wyatt Dixon's face, then squeezed the trigger. But the shot was low and must have hit the steering wheel. Dixon's hands flew into the air as though they had been scalded.

He shifted into first and drove into the field, headed for the dirt road and the log bridge that would take him across the river. I walked into the yard and fired until the cylinder was empty, the recoil jerking my wrists upward with each shot, my ears almost deaf now. The entry holes on the truck cab looked like dented silver coins embedded in the metal.

I watched the truck grow smaller in the distance and I thought Wyatt Dixon had eluded us again. Then the truck swayed out of the track and cruised through a long swath of Indian paintbrush and came to a stop six inches from the trunk of an aspen tree.

I went back into the house and removed a box of hollow-point.45 rounds from the kitchen table and shucked out the spent shells from L.Q.'s cylinder and began reloading. Temple and Doc were out in the backyard, staring at the truck in the distance. Doc worked the bolt on his Springfield rifle and ejected a spent cartridge in the dirt and locked down the bolt again. The keys to his pickup were on the table. I picked them up and dropped them into the drawer I had taken the box of.45 rounds from and closed the drawer, just as Doc entered the room.