Bitterroot (21 page)

A boy in his early twenties, in beltless khakis and a pressed, long-sleeved denim shirt with a pair of glasses in the pocket, was standing by her chair now. He held a green and gold can of ginger ale in his hand, and the wetness of the can dripped through his fingers. His eyes crinkled at the corners.

“Can I help you with something?” she asked.

“I heard you talking and I knew you were from the South. I’m from North Ca’lina. So it was me bought you the drinks. Did you mind I did that?” he said.

She tried to sort through what he had just said. Behind him, on a revolving bar stool, sat a man in a white, wide-brim Stetson and a cowboy shirt that rippled with an electric blue sheen. He was watching her and the boy with the naked curiosity of an animal. “Say again?” Maisey said.

“I didn’t want to offend you by buying those drinks without asking, but you’re really a pretty lady,” the boy said.

“Who’s that man watching us?” she said, then realized her anxiety had made her seek reassurance from a stranger whose features disturbed her for reasons she didn’t understand, like someone who belonged inside a drunk dream.

“That’s Wyatt. He wants me to rodeo with him, but I think I’m gonna study aeronautical engineering at the university.”

“Aeronautical engineering at the University of Montana?”

“I haven’t made up my mind. I might study religion or forestry instead. You want to dance?”

“I have to go home.”

“Another vodka collins is coming. You got to stay for the drink. It’s bad manners if you don’t stay for the drink.”

“Your friend is using his hand for a codpiece. Who are you?” she said, her head spinning.

“I’m the guy bought the drinks,” he replied, and wrinkled his nose.

She gathered up her purse and rose from the table and walked toward the front door, realizing, as the blood rushed to her feet, that she was drunk.

Outside, the air was cold, the wetness of the street glazed with yellow light. She walked toward the main thoroughfare, although she had no idea what she intended to do. The door of a parked car opened in front of her, and one of the football players stepped out on the sidewalk and grinned at her.

Then he was joined by his two friends. They towered over her, like trees. No matter which direction she turned, she could see nothing but the size of their chests and arms, the necks that were as thick as fire hydrants, the tautness of their grins.

“I want to catch a cab. Can I get one on Higgins?” she said.

“We’ll take you home,” one of the boys said.

“No, that’s all right. I have money for a cab,” she said.

“Come on, get in back. You shouldn’t be out on the street by yourself,” the same boy said.

His face seemed to come into focus for the first time. He had bad skin and his crewcut hair was peroxided. A tiny green shamrock was tattooed on his throat.

“I’m going now. Let me get by,” she said.

But one of the other boys placed his arm around her shoulders. He inflated his bicep against her, like someone spinning the handle of a vise to show its potential, and the testosterone smell of his armpit rose into her face.

“Let go of me,” she said, her eyes looking between their bodies at the backs of a couple who were walking in the opposite direction.

“There’s a lot of street people around here, Maisey, guys with dirty things on their minds,” the first boy said.

How did he know her name? she thought. They were pressing her inside the car now, not all at once, not in a violent fashion, just with the proximity of their size, almost as though they were her attendants, as though they knew her and what she thought and what her history was and what she deserved from them.

She was halfway in the car now, and the boy with peroxided hair leaned close to her face, blocking out all light from the street, his breath sweet with mouth spray.

He raised one finger to his lips. “Nobody’s out here. Just us, Maisey. Don’t act like a kid,” he said. She got her hand inside her purse and felt it close on a metal nail file. His right eye suddenly looked as big as a quarter, as blue and deep as an inkwell.

But a pair of high-beam headlights pulled in behind the boys’ car. The three boys stood erect, their heads turning. A car door opened, and a figure walked out of the headlights’ glare, and Maisey could see the physical size of the three boys somehow deflating, like air leaking from a balloon.

“That’s my friend. Y’all shouldn’t be bothering her,” the boy who had bought her the drinks said.

But the football players, if that’s what they were, were not looking at the boy who’d said he was from North Carolina. Instead, they stared at the man in the wide-brim white hat and blue silk shirt who stood behind him, his hands curled inward, simian-like, toward his thighs.

“We got no quarrel with you, buddy,” the boy with peroxided hair said.

“That’s right, you don’t,” the man in the hat said. “That’s why you little farts are gone.”

Maisey looked on in disbelief as her three tormentors walked away.

“We’ll get you home safe,” the boy from North Carolina said.

“I can get a cab,” she said.

“Those guys will come after you when me and Wyatt leave. They’re always causing trouble here’bouts. Is your name Maisey?” he said.

“How did you know?”

“I heard that guy use your name, that’s all,” he replied. He held the door open for her, his face suffused with goodwill. Maisey looked back at the nightclub. One of the football players stood just inside the entrance, cleaning his nails with a toothpick. She got into the car.

The man named Wyatt sat in back and the boy, who said his name was Terry, started the engine. The car was red, low-slung, high-powered, with a stick shift on the floor, and Terry drove it full out, tacking up on the curves as they headed toward Bonner and the Blackfoot River, dropping back in front of a semi so abruptly the car shook on its springs.

But even though he drove too fast, she began to feel all the evening’s fear and apprehension and self-condemnation go out of her chest.

“What’d you say your last name was?” the man named Wyatt said.

“Voss. Maisey Voss,” she said.

“You related to a doctor by that name?” Wyatt asked.

“He’s my father.”

“I read about him in the paper. Man named Holland live with y’all?”

Maisey turned in the seat. “Billy Bob Holland does,” she said.

“I declare. Now that’s a fellow I admire. He was the lawyer for my sister, Katie Jo Winset. Ain’t this world a miracle of coincidences?” Wyatt said.

“I don’t understand,” Maisey said.

“A sweet thing like you don’t have to.” Wyatt leaned forward, his arm propped on the back of her seat, his eyes close to hers. “You like Terry?”

“Pardon?”

“He likes
you.
He gets that possum grin on his face and I know what he’s thinking about.” “Lay off it, Wyatt,” Terry said. Wyatt’s hand lay close to her shoulder. The nails were clipped and clean, the fingers as pale and thick and gnarled as turnips. The back of his ring finger touched her skin. She felt herself jerk, as though she had been burned with a piece of ice.

“Mr. Holland got a young’un up at Dr. Voss’s place? A boy named Lucas?”

“Yes,” Maisey said, looking straight ahead now, watching a lighted gas station slide behind them in the darkness.

“You know who I am, don’t you?” Wyatt said at the back of her head.

“No.”

“You ever go to Sunday school?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know it’s a sin to lie.”

“Give it a rest, Wyatt,” Terry said. The inside of the car became very quiet. Maisey forced herself to turn and look in the backseat. Wyatt was staring at Terry, his head tilted slightly. Terry glanced in the rearview mirror, his eyes like two marbles caught inside the glass.

   “I’m gonna pull in for gas,” Terry said.

“You do that,” Wyatt said.

“Wyatt?”

But Wyatt only grinned and didn’t answer. “Wyatt?” Terry said again.

“Lend me your comb. This beautiful girl has made me sweat inside my hat,” Wyatt said.

Terry pulled off the highway into a truck stop and parked the car by a gas pump. He got out and put the nozzle into the gas tank and began cleaning the windows. He seemed to study Wyatt’s face through the glass.

“You want me to pay for it?” Terry asked.

“No, I’m going in. Maybe get us some fried pies. Other supplies, too,” Wyatt said, as though coming out of a trance. He smiled in a knowing way at Terry and pushed Maisey’s seat forward and got out of the car.

Terry watched him enter the truck stop, then he pulled the gas nozzle from the tank and clanked it back on the pump and got into the car. Through the truck stop window he watched Wyatt pay for the gas, then return to the counter and exchange a dollar bill for silver and go into the men’s room.

Terry chewed on his lip, his eyes busy with thought.

“What are you doing?” Maisey said.

“Don’t worry about it,” Terry said, and started the car and burned rubber onto the highway.

They roared through Bonner, passing the lumber mill and a church and a school and rows of company houses with birch trees in the yards. Terry poured on the gas at the edge of town and the tires squealed on the curves above the Blackfoot River.

“Slow down,” she said.

“Don’t be telling me what to do, Maisey,” he said.

“Where are we going?”

“To your house. Where you think?” he replied.

“I didn’t tell you where I live.”

“Yeah, you did. You just don’t remember.”

He had his glasses on now and he was breathing through his mouth, like a fish on land, his cheeks and neck bladed with color.

“You were the man at my window,” she said.

“I’m taking you home now. That’s all you should care about. Then I’m going back for Wyatt. You don’t realize what you’ve made me do.”

“Made you do
what?”
she asked.

“Things just don’t work out for me,” Terry said, and hit his fist on the steering wheel. “I just don’t know why. They just never work out. I’d like to tear somebody apart right now.”

He squeezed the floor shift knob tightly in his hand and passed a camper on the double stripe, whipping back into the proper lane an instant before an oncoming log truck crested the hill in front of them. He shot the finger at the truck’s headlights.

Chapter

17

AFTER TERRY WITHERSPOON had dropped Maisey off and she had told Doc of the events of the evening, I thought he was going to go after either Witherspoon or Wyatt Dixon or the three football players at the nightclub.

Or at least lecture Maisey on her recklessness.

“Wyatt Dixon went into the rest room with a handful of change? That’s when this kid Witherspoon decided to bag it down the road?” Doc said.

“Yes. Was the older man going to buy—” Maisey began.

“Come on into the kitchen,” Doc said.

“What is it?” she said.

“You didn’t eat supper,” he said, and removed two steaks from the freezer and unwrapped them from butcher paper at the sink and began thawing them with hot water. “Why don’t you help me slice a few potatoes and we’ll cook some hash browns?”

Maisey looked at him curiously.

“You’re not mad?” she asked.

“Not at you, Maisey. Never at you,” he replied.

She placed a chopping board on the counter top near the sink and began peeling an Idaho potato, pausing to glance at her father’s profile, as though seeing him for the first time.

NICKI MOLINARI didn’t give up easily. I saw him in downtown Missoula the next morning, coming out of a sporting goods store. He carried a tennis shoe box under his arm.

“You saved me a trip out to your place. Come out to the ball field with me. It’s right down by the river,” he said.

“No, thanks,” I replied.

“You want this guy Wyatt Dixon out of your hair? Or maybe you’d like him climbing your investigator, what’s the lady’s name, Temple something? Give it some thought, Mr. Holland.”

He got into his convertible and drove away.

I tried to ignore what he had said, but he had planted the hook. I drove my truck down to the ball diamond by the Clark Fork and parked behind the stands and walked toward the third-base line. Nicki Molinari was hitting grounders to three other men out on the diamond, splintering the ball low and hard across the grass.

Two people were sitting on the top row of the otherwise empty stands. The man lifted his hand in recognition, but the woman with him kept her gaze fixed on the field, her face as hard-planed as refrigerated wax.

Nicki Molinari tossed his bat to another player and walked toward me.

  “What are Xavier and Holly Girard doing here?” I asked, nodding toward the top of the stands.

“He’s writing a book about me. I got stock in her new movie. It’s being shot on the Blackfoot. Why, that bother you?” Nicki said.

“You said something about my investigator, Temple Carrol.”

“Yeah, I want my seven hundred large back from the skank. That’s Cleo Lonnigan to you. You’re not interested in a finder’s fee, I can shake and bake Wyatt Dixon for you or anybody else who might be giving you a hard time.”

“Why’d you mention Temple?”

“Dixon almost tore out your son’s package. What do you think he’d do to a woman?”

“How do you know all this stuff, Nicki?”

“Ah, my first name again. It’s my business to know.”

“Good. Stay out of mine,” I said, and turned to leave.

He caught up with me and placed two fingers on my arm. They were moist with perspiration. He looked at my face and took his hand away.

“It’s not my purpose to be enemies with you,” he said. “We got a, what do you call it, a symbiotic relationship. You see that big guy out by second base? He works for me. He’s incontinent and blows gas in crowded elevators and thinks Nostradamus is a college football team. But he’s got a talent. Know what it is?”

   “He kills people?”

“He’s a great second baseman. We were on the same team at TI. In a playoff game nobody could figure out how I was wetting down the ball. I didn’t touch my face or hat or belt, but my curve was jumping out of the catcher’s mitt. Know how I did it?”