Bitterroot (11 page)

And I knew what Doc had meant when he said that neither the weight of headstones nor our heartbreaking and vain attempts at re-creating first love would ever disallow the hold of the dead upon the quick.

THE NEXT NIGHT Lamar Ellison was in a bar up the Blackfoot River, crashed on beer and reds, listening to the country band, talking to Sue Lynn, splitting a pitcher with Hollywood movie types who liked to float the Blackfoot and the Little Big Horn in safari hats and fly vests that showed off their suntans. Who knows, maybe he’d end up in the movies himself. Hey, look what happened to the Angels when they latched on to Leary and all these middle-class pukes who couldn’t wait to fry their heads with Osley purple.

There was Holly Girard over at the bar, her husband, too. Xavier was big shit with the writers’ community around here. Big shit in New York and Hollywood, too. European television crews interviewed him in lowlife bars, which Lamar couldn’t figure out, because why would a guy who owned a mansion above the river want everybody to see him on camera with drooling rummies?

Had Xavier heard about that rape beef? That doctor, the SEAL, was a writer or poet, too, wasn’t he? Man, that wasn’t good. Xavier had keys to the right doors and got an artistic buzz or something goofing with bikers and guys who’d been inside. Besides, the guy’s wife was a first-rate box of chocolates.

Lamar took the pitcher back up to the bar and stood next to Xavier, nodding at both him and his wife, blowing his cigarette smoke at an upward angle to show the right respect.

“Hey, my man Xavier,” Lamar said.

“Yeah, Lamar, what’s happenin’?” Xavier said. But his eyes were oblique, focused on the band and the dancers out on the floor, a swizzle stick deep in his jaw.

His wife was even worse, gazing out the door, chin in the air, like her shit should be bronzed and used for paperweights.

“I got some bad press. It was a bum beef, though. The sheriff knew it from the get-go. That’s why he cut me loose. I got no bad feelings against that doctor. The dude was in Force Recon. I went to Wal-Mart to buy his book but they didn’t have it,” Lamar said.

“I don’t read the papers a lot, so I’m not real tuned in on it. We’re about to boogie, Lamar,” Xavier said.

“How you doin’, Ms. Girard?” Lamar said, leaning forward so she could see his face.

“I’m quite well,” she said. But she didn’t turn her head toward him and her eyes were lowered, as though she did not want to see him even on the corner of her vision.

“I’m a big fan,” he said.

“Thank you. That’s very kind,” she replied.

He started to speak again, but she picked up her purse and walked past him to the rest room. She wore a silvery-blue dress that trembled like ice water on her rump.

“Man, she’s—” he said to Xavier.

“She’s what?” Xavier said, turning toward him.

“Real talented.” Lamar watched Xavier sip from his shot glass, then chase the whiskey with beer. The guy must have a liver the size of a football, he thought. How’s a drunk fuck like that end up with money and fame and educated broads falling all over him in bookstores?

He felt his irritability growing. “I’m starting to get a big chill here. I do something to you or your lady?” he said.

“No, I just have to go home and write.”

“You drink B-52’s before you write? … Look, I never went asking for no trouble. I’m not a bad guy. You want to see a badass? Check the cowboy in the corner. That’s Wyatt Dixon.”

“You need to let go of my arm, Lamar.” “I’m paying out thirteen hundred bucks for a new bridge. I didn’t press charges against your friend. But I end up on the front page of the fucking newspaper …”

“I know what you mean,” Xavier said, peeling Lamar’s hand loose from his arm. “Those news guys don’t know character when they see it.”

Then both Xavier and his wife were out the door, and Lamar’s face felt full of needles, his ears humming with sound, as though he had been slapped.

HE TALKED awhile with Sue Lynn at the table, even though she had come to the bar with Wyatt. You had to show Wyatt you weren’t afraid of him. Not head on, nothing confrontational, just a little signal you didn’t rattle. Then he had gone outside and smoked some Mexican gage with two other bikers, swigging off a long-neck beer on top of their scooters, digging the sunset, watching the log trucks disappear up the grade in the dusk, trying to get rid of the vague sense of humiliation he’d felt when the Girards walked away from him like he was wrapped in stink.

But reefer and alcohol together always seemed to cook a terminal or two in his head. When he went back inside and sat down with Sue Lynn, he started talking. And talking. And talking. Without control, as though somebody had shot him up with a combo of crystal meth and Sodium Pentothal.

Then his brain kicked into gear again and he heard his own voice, in mid-sentence, as though waking from a dream, totally unaware of what he had just said.

Sue Lynn was a breed and looked as if she’d been poured out of two different paint buckets, but that didn’t explain the whacked-out stare she was giving him now.

“I say something wrong?” Lamar asked.

“Fuck you,” she replied.

“Who put a broom up your ass?”

Her eyes were red and glistening, as though she’d had a few hits of gage herself. She pushed back her chair and picked up her beer bottle and went out the door and let the screen slam behind her.

Now Wyatt was looking at him from the corner of the room. How many people in here had any idea what kind of guy was in their midst? They thought Wyatt was one of their own, with his flat-brim cowboy hat and triangular back and narrow waist and small, hard butt inside skintight jeans. But anybody who’d ever been on the yard would scope out a dude like Wyatt Dixon in five seconds.

Lamar winked and gave him a thumbs-up. But Wyatt just looked at him with those colorless, dead eyes, his mouth like a purple slit, as though he knew something about Lamar’s future that Lamar did not.

Well, eat shit and die, Lamar thought. Why was everybody either in his face or on his case? A doctor, for Christ’s sake, knocks his bridge down his throat. An ATF prick gets his jollies describing how his ears are going to get lopped off. He tries to talk reason to this Texas lawyer and the lawyer points a gun at his crotch. A Hollywood movie star and her rumdum husband blow their noses on him in a public place and Sue Lynn tells him to get fucked.

Maybe it was time to think about losing Montana and heading back out to the Coast. He could almost see himself tooling down the PCH to Neptune’s Net on the Ventura County line, staying high on the sounds of surf and salt wind and waves crashing on rocks. Let the shitkickers frolic with the sheep.

He got on his Harley and bagged it down the road, leaning into the curves, the roar of his exhaust flattening against the cliffs on the roadside. The sun had sunk below the mountains, and the sky was ribbed with strips of purple cloud. A pickup truck came toward him out of the dusk and sucked past him in a rush of cold air, but through the window he recognized the driver, that damned Texas doctor he wished he’d never set eyes on.

Did the doctor recognize him? He didn’t need a return performance of that night in the bar at Lincoln. Lamar watched the truck disappear in his rearview mirror, then lifted his face into the wind again, secretly ashamed of the relief he felt.

He rounded another curve and saw a cottage supported by pilings on the edge of the river and a white Cherokee parked by the lilac bushes in front. It was the same Cherokee that Holly and Xavier Girard had left the saloon in. There were lights on behind the shades, and smoke rose from a barbecue pit on the deck above the water.

Maybe the evening still held promise after all.

Lamar pulled onto a gravel turnaround against the mountain, killed his engine, and walked back down the shoulder of the road to the Cherokee. He bent down over each tire and sliced off the valve stem with his pocketknife, then stepped back and viewed his handiwork.

It still needed a little something extra.

He found some rocks under a culvert, heavy and solid and hand-sized for throwing. He heaved one through the front window and two through the passenger windows, then reached inside with his knife and began slicing the leather seats.

That’s when he heard Xavier Girard running at him.

It was funny how a celebrity punk thought the real world was like the one he made up in his books. Lamar shifted his knife to his left hand and caught Xavier in the mouth with his right. Xavier went down in the gravel like a sack of grain.

Lamar shook his fingers.

“You must have ate your iron pills today. I think you busted my hand, Xavier,” he said.

   Xavier didn’t answer. He was on his hands and knees now, his mouth dripping blood and spittle, his stomach hanging out of his belt like a balloon full of milk.

“You’re done, Xavier. Don’t get up. Oh well, I guess this means I don’t get a part in one of your wife’s movies,” Lamar said.

He pulled Xavier the rest of the way to his feet, then propped him against the side of the Cherokee and drove his fist into Xavier’s stomach, just below the sternum.

Xavier fell to his knees and vomited, then pressed his forehead against the gravel, gasping for breath, his back shaking.

“See you around. By the way, I read one of your books in the joint. I thought it sucked,” Lamar said, and started back toward his Harley.

But Xavier’s hand caught the calf of his leg, then he wrapped both arms around Lamar’s thigh.

“You want a little soft-shoe? ‘Cause this time I’m gonna take out all your teeth,” Lamar said, and cocked back his boot.

Holly Girard seemed to float out of nowhere, holding a nickel-plated revolver with both hands, the tiny bones in her hands whitening behind the cylinder. Her dark blond tresses hung on her cheeks and her mouth was as red and soft-looking as a strawberry that he would have loved to burst against his teeth.

He stepped back from her, his palms raised upward. Three or four other people had walked out of the cottage behind her.

“It’s over as far as I’m concerned. Your old man shouldn’t have dissed me. You want to call the heat, I understand your point of view,” he said.

That ought to leave a fishhook or two in her head, he thought.

But when he looked at her eyes, then at Xavier and the other people from the cottage, he realized they never heard him, that the loathing and disgust they felt for him was so great they viewed him as they would a voiceless obscenity trapped under a glass bell.

He walked away, toward his motorcycle, his hobnailed boots crunching on the gravel. When he turned around they were gone, back inside the cottage, probably dialing 911.

So what? He was probably better off in the can than back on the street. He fired up his Harley and roared down the asphalt.

Home was a one-room block house made of railroad ties and an open-air tin shed where he sometimes repaired motorcycles. But it was on the Blackfoot, right upstream from a bar that was surrounded by pine trees, and he could cross the water on a cable-hung walk-bridge and shoot deer and bear up a canyon just above the old railroad bed. This spring he had killed a black bear and had hung it by its hind legs from an engine hoist to dress it out, then had gotten drunk and let the meat spoil. The bear still hung in the shed, coated with blowflies, its smell rising up against the tin roof of the shed as the day heated.

He sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness of his cabin, stripped to the waist, and smoked a joint and drank a quart bottle of beer, then lay back on the pillow and went to sleep. Tomorrow was another day. The same sun would rise on the jail as on the river. You just stayed on the hucklebuck, man. It didn’t matter where you did it.

In his dream he thought he heard the weight of the black bear swinging slightly from the engine hoist in the tin shed, then he awoke and realized someone was in the room with him.

A chain locked down across his throat, the links binding and cutting into his skin. Lamar pried at the chain with his fingers, but the dark figure who stood above him fitted a pipe over the boom handle, as a professional logger would, and squeezed down the boom, tightening it until saliva ran from both corners of Lamar’s mouth.

Lamar heard the rattle of liquid inside a tin container, then a splashing sound on the floor. The unmistakable sharpness of paint thinner climbed into his nostrils. A match flared in the figure’s hands and just briefly in the illumination Lamar saw a face that was both strange and familiar at the same time.

The fire spread under his bed in seconds. He thrashed his legs, twisting his head back and forth, and beat his fists against his own skull.

The fire swelled over him in a cone, and inside the flames he thought he heard a sound like blowflies and he saw himself, for just an instant, hanging upside down over a bright fissure in the earth he had long ago convinced himself did not exist.

Chapter

10

WITH THE CLARITY OF VISION and singleness of purpose that seemed to characterize everything Sheriff Cain did, he arrested Doc Voss the next afternoon and lodged him in the county jail.

   
I went into the sheriff’s office without knocking. He lowered the newspaper he was reading and looked at me over his spectacles.

“You grow up in a hog lot?” he said.

“What makes you think you can get away with something like this?” I said.

He took his feet off his desk. “Let’s see if I understand you correctly,” he said. “Putting a friend of yours in jail on a murder warrant is somehow outside my job description?”

“On what evidence?”

He yawned sleepily. “On a previous occasion he almost killed the victim in a bar. The victim later raped the suspect’s daughter. The suspect, that’s Dr. Voss I’m talking about, was in the Phoenix Program in Vietnam and probably did things to human beings that would make most people vomit. If you were still a Texas Ranger, who’d you be looking at?”