Bitterroot (4 page)

Behind me, Doc continued his earnest instruction to his audience: “See, you guys motor on in to Lincoln because you think it’s a place with no parameters. The home of the Unabomber, right? A guy who had stink on him that would make buzzards fall out of the sky but who went unnoticed by the locals for twenty years.

“See, what you don’t understand is these people are very square and territorial. One time a bunch of guys like you decided to take over a town in the Gallatin Valley on a Saturday afternoon. They started shoving people around in bars, busting beer bottles in the streets, riding their hogs across church lawns, you know, like in the Marlon Brando film
The Wild One.

“Guess what? In two hours every mill worker, gypo logger, and sheepherder in the county came into town. They parked their log trucks across the roads so the bikers couldn’t get out. They broke arms and legs and bent Harleys around telephone poles. Some of the bikers got down on their knees and begged. The townies left enough of the bikers intact to take the wounded into Billings.”

I went into the men’s room. When I came back out, Doc was still talking. The bikers smoked cigarettes and poured beer into their glasses and drank in measured sips, tipping their ashes into an empty can, occasionally glancing at one another.

One of their girls was watching the scene from the cigarette machine, her arms folded in front of her. She was an Indian, perhaps part white, her long hair streaked with strands of dull yellow. She wore a lavender T-shirt and Levi’s that hung low on her hips, exposing her navel. She stared directly into my eyes. When I looked back at her, she tilted her head slightly as though I had not understood a point she was making.

“The waitress is fixing to throw your food out, Doc,” I said.

“Go on. I’ll be there,” he replied, waving me away.

I went back out into the restaurant and sat down across from Cleo. A strand of her hair hung out of her baseball cap across one eye.

“Where do you and Doc know each other from?” I said, glancing back at the bar area.

“A support group,” she replied.

“Pardon?”

“It’s a group that meets in Missoula. For people who have—” She saw that I was still watching the bar area. “What are you asking for?”

“I’m sorry,” I said, my attention coming back on her face. “You said a support group. I didn’t know what you meant.”

Her left hand was turned palm down on the table. There was no wedding ring on it. “It’s for people who have lost family members to violence. Doc’s wife died in a plane crash. My husband and son were murdered. So we attend the same meetings. That’s how we met. I thought that’s what you were asking me,” she said.

The skin of my face felt tight against the bone. The restaurant seemed filled with the clatter of dishes and cacophonous conversation about insignificant subjects.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to—” I began, but the waitress arrived at the table and began setting plates of steak and potatoes in front of us. Cleo had already lost interest in anything I had to say by way of apology.

Behind her, the Indian biker girl from the bar walked between the tables, watching me, as though she knew me or expected me to intuit private meaning in her stare.

“Why not get a new cigarette machine instead of putting tape all over it? It not only looks like shit, the cigarettes don’t come out,” she said to the woman behind the cash register.

“Let me give you some breath mints instead. Oh, there’s no charge. Don’t they sell cigarettes on the reservation?” the cashier said.

The Indian girl took the last cigarette out of her pack and put it in her mouth, her weight on one foot, her eyes staring into the cashier’s.

The cashier smiled tolerantly. “Sorry, honey. But you should learn how to talk to people,” she said.

“My speech coach says the same thing. I’m always saying blow me to patronizing white people,” the Indian girl said.

She paused by our booth and momentarily rested her fingers on the tabletop and lit her cigarette.

“Your doctor friend is in Lamar Ellison’s face. I’d get him out of here,” she said, her eyes looking straight ahead.

She walked away, toward the bar.

“Who is
that?”
Cleo said.

“I don’t know. But I don’t like eating at the O.K. Corral,” I said.

I got up from the table and went back to the bar.

“Your food’s getting cold, Doc,” I said.

“I was just coming,” he replied. Then he said to the bikers, “Y’all think on it. Why get your wick snuffed being somebody’s hump? I’ll check with you later.”

I placed my hand under his arm and gently pulled him with me.

“What’s wrong with you?” I said.

“You just got to turn these guys around. It’s the rednecks who win the wars. The liberals are waiting around on a grant.”

“We’re eating supper, then blowing this place. Or at least I am.”

“You’re in Montana. This is no big deal.”

He cut into his steak and put a piece into his mouth and drank from his beer, his eyes looking reflectively at the three engineers from the gold mine.

I waited for him to start in on another soliloquy, but an event taking place in the bar had suddenly captured his attention.

Two men and a woman had come in, people who were obviously from somewhere else, their features soft around the edges, their shoulders rounded, their faces circumspect yet self-indulgent and vaguely adventurous. They had taken a booth in the bar, then perhaps one of them had glanced at the bikers, or said something or laughed in a way a biker did not approve of, or maybe it was just their bad luck that their physical weakness gave off an odor like raw meat to a tiger.

One of the bikers took a toothpick out of his mouth and set it in an ashtray. He rose from his chair and walked to their booth, drinking from a long-necked beer bottle, his jeans bagging in the seat. He stared down at them, not speaking, the stench of his body and clothes rising into their faces like a stain.

“Somebody’s got to put a tether on those boys,” Doc said.

“Don’t do it, Tobin,” I said.

Doc wiped the steak grease off his mouth and hands with a napkin, the alcoholic warmth gone from his eyes now, and walked back toward the bar.

Cleo rested her forehead on her fingers and let out her breath.

“This was a mistake. It’s time to go,” she said. She looked up at me. “Aren’t you going to do something?”

“It’s somebody else’s fight,” I said.

“How chivalric,” she said.

“Doc resents people mixing in his business.”

“I’m going to get him out of there if you won’t.”

“Ask the waitress for the check,” I said, and returned to the bar area.

The biker towering over the three tourists wore a leather vest with no shirt and steel-toed engineering boots; his jaws and chin were heavy with gold stubble, his hair tangled in snakes like a Visigoth’s. His arms were scrolled with tattoos of daggers dripping blood, helmeted skulls, swastikas, a naked woman in a biker cap chained by the wrists to motorcycle handlebars. The three people in the booth looked at nothing, their hands and bodies motionless, their mouths moving slightly, as though they did not know which expression they wanted their faces to form.

“Excuse me, but you were pinning my friends,” the biker said. “Then I got the impression you cracked wise about something. Like your shit don’t stink, like other people ain’t worthy of respect. I just want you to know we ain’t got no beef with nobody. Ain’t no biker here gonna hurt you. Everybody cool with that?”

The two men in the booth started to nod imperceptibly, as though their acquiescence would open a door in an airless, superheated room. But the biker was watching the woman.

“You want another beer?” he asked her. He reached out with one finger and touched her lips. “Smile for me. Come on, you got a nice mouth. You don’t want to walk around with a pout on it.”

Her throat swallowed and her eyes were shiny, her nostrils dilated and white on the edges.

“Here, let me show you,” the biker said. He worked his finger into her mouth, wedging it open, forcing it past her teeth, reaching inside her cheek.

“Now, just a minute,” the man next to her said.

“You don’t want to touch me, Jack. That’s something you really don’t want to do,” the biker said, while the woman’s saliva ran down his finger.

Doc stepped into the biker’s field of vision, raising his hand as a peacemaker might.

“You need to walk outside and get some air, trooper … No, no, it’s not up for debate,” Doc said.

The biker didn’t speak. Instead, his left hand, the index finger still wet from the woman’s mouth, seemed to float like a balloon toward the side of Doc’s head, as though he were about to caress it.

Doc’s movements were so fast I was never sure later whether he hit the biker first with his hand or his foot. I saw him spin, then the biker’s head snapped back and his mouth exploded in the air. Doc spun again, his foot flying out in a reverse back kick, and I was sure this time I heard bones or teeth snap.

The biker was on the floor now, and I could see spittle and blood on his lips. But his pain and disfigurement were the least of his problems. He was strangling to death.

“Get out of the way!” I heard Cleo say behind me. Then she was on her knees by the biker, pressing his tongue down with a spoon, reaching into his windpipe with her fingers, extracting part of a dental bridge.

I walked outside, past the row of parked Harleys, and removed L.Q. Navarro’s blue-black, holstered .45 from the shell on the back of my pickup truck. I dropped the pistol on the front seat and waited for the sheriff’s deputies and the paramedics, who I knew would be there momentarily. The sky was black, the mountains steep-sided, the trees suddenly pale green when lightning jumped between the clouds. Down the highway I saw the red emergency lights of an ambulance roaring toward me inside a vortex of rain.

Nailed to a telephone pole was a drenched, wind-torn poster advertising a rodeo in Stevensville, down in the Bitterroot Valley. On the ad was an action photo of a rodeo clown distracting a bull that had just thrown a cowboy into the boards. For some reason the incongruous image of the helpful clown, dressed in vagabond clothes, wearing a derby hat with horns attached to it, would not leave my mind.

Chapter

4

TWO DAYS LATER I drove west of Missoula, past the U.S. Forest Service smoke-jumper school, then up a sharp grade between wooded mountains into a long green valley ringed by more mountains. I looked at the map Doc had drawn for me and drove across the Jocko River and followed a dirt road between two bald hills to the gated entrance of Cleo Lonnigan’s property.

The morning was still cold. Smoke blew from the stone chimney of her house, and horses were standing in the sun by a barn that was wet on one side with melting frost.

I walked up on the porch and knocked on the door and removed my hat when she answered it.

“I wanted to apologize for speaking ineptly about your loss. Doc told me about it later,” I said.

“That’s why you drove all the way out here?” she asked.

“More or less.”

There was no screen on the door. She stood perhaps a foot from me but had not asked me in, so that the space between us and her lack of hospitality were even more awkward.

“How’s Doc?” she asked.

“The biker didn’t file charges, so the cops let Doc slide. I guess getting your face bashed in is just part of an evening out here.”

“Pacifists in Montana get about the same respect as vegetarians and gay rights advocates,” she said. “You saved that biker’s life,” I said. She looked at me without replying, as though examining my words for manipulation or design.

I fitted on my Stetson and glanced around at the sunlight on her pasture and her horses drinking in a creek that was lined with aspens and cottonwoods.

“Can I take you for breakfast in town?” I asked.

“Doc says you were a Texas Ranger.”

“Yeah, before I got hurt. I started off as a city cop in Houston.”

She seemed to look past me, into the distance. “I have some coffee on the stove,” she said.

Her house was built of lacquered pine, with big windows that looked out on the hills and cathedral ceilings and heavy plank furniture inside and stone fireplaces and pegs in the walls for hats and coats. In the kitchen she poured a cup of coffee for me in a white mug. Out back two llamas were grazing in a lot that was nubbed down to the dirt, and, farther on, up a hill that was still golden with winter grass, a whitetail doe with two fawns stood on the edge of a deep green stand of Douglas fir.

“Are you and Doc pretty tight?” I said, my face deliberately blank.

“Sometimes. In his own mind Doc’s still married.”

“I don’t see Doc in your support group,” I said.

   “Why?”

“His wife died in an accident. I suspect most people in your group have lost relatives to criminal acts.”

“Doc’s wife worked for the utility company. They made her fly to Colorado in bad weather. He blames them for her death.”

“I never heard him say that,” I said.

“Sometimes if you confess your real thoughts, people will be afraid of you,” she replied.

But I knew she was talking about herself now and not Doc. He had told me about her husband, a stockbroker from San Francisco who had taken early retirement and bought a ranch in the Jocko Valley six years ago. He and Cleo’d had a six-year-old son. Their lives should have been idyllic. Instead, there were rumors about infidelity and money-laundering back in San Francisco. The husband filed for divorce, accusing his wife of adultery, and won summer visitation rights with his son. He moved to Coeur d’Alene and each June came back to Montana and picked up his boy.

On a July Fourth weekend two years ago, the father’s and the son’s bodies had been found in the trunk of the father’s automobile on the Clearwater National Forest. The automobile had been burned.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she said.

“No reason.”

“Doc told you everything that happened?”