Bitterroot (41 page)

Beer-joint women kissed his fingers and men feared them. He chewed cigars like plug tobacco, sewed his own wounds, asked no favors, drank tequila like water, borrowed no money, carried all of his possessions in a cardboard suitcase, read a new comic book every night, wore two-hundred-dollar hats, and stitched an American flag as a liner inside the duster he wore in rainy or cold weather.

But it was the greasepaint grin that bothered his rodeo cohorts. When Wyatt wiped the grease off his face, the lunatic expression was still there, accentuated by eyes that were full of invasiveness and light that had no origin. A female barrel racer claimed he raped her. The board members of the RCA tried to ban him from the circuit.

So what? The good life was always there, sleeping in a bedroll under the stars, sometimes shacking up in a trailer, carrying plenty of cash, drinking beer and eating Mexican food whenever he wanted and grilling steaks in roadside parks up in the high desert. Everybody loved a cowboy. This was a great country, by God.

The only problems in life came from disloyalty. That’s what Carl Hinkel didn’t understand. A man who claimed to be a patriot and should have known better. But Wyatt knew that under the pose of the Virginia gentleman Carl was weak and dependent. That in itself was forgivable. But ingratitude and disrespect were a form of betrayal, and that was not.

After Carl had called him “boy” and Wyatt had rubbed Carl’s nose in it, Carl had tried to straighten it out in the dining room, in front of a half dozen others. Big mistake.

Wyatt was at the steam table, bagging up a lunch to eat out on the riverbank.

“I can’t abide a soldier sassing me like that, Wyatt,* Carl said.

“Is that right?” Wyatt said, without looking up from the sandwich he was making.

“You were out of line, son,” Carl said.

Wyatt filled the side of a butter knife with mustard and layered it on his sandwich bread, nodding, as though digesting a profound statement.

“Would you hand me those ‘maters, Carl?” he said.

Carl gestured to a boy behind the steam table, who picked up a platter of sliced tomatoes and tried to give them to Wyatt. Wyatt ignored him.

“You got what some folks might call a serious character defect, Carl. You cain’t cut it on your own. That’s why the airborne run you off. That’s why you got to surround yourself with a bunch of sawed-off little pissants don’t know their own mind. Now get the fuck out of my face.”

AT DAWN Friday morning Terry woke in his shack above the Clark Fork and saw Wyatt standing against the window, inside the shack, the blue-green softness of the pines and the mists off the river rising up behind him. The fire in the woodstove had gone out and the room was cold, the air brittle. Terry hugged the quilt around him and sat up on his bunk. The German dagger Carl had given him lay on the table in the center of the room, the swastikas on the white handle as bright as drops of blood.

“I knowed a preacher who used to say, ‘Fool me oncet, shame on you. Fool me twicet, shame on me,’” Wyatt said. He wore a heavy long-sleeve crimson shirt, with his purple garters on the arms, and tight jeans and his flat-brimmed black hat with the Indian band around the crown.

“I don’t know what I did wrong, Wyatt. I don’t know why you’re mad at me.”

Wyatt picked up the dagger and eased it halfway out of the sheath. The chromed blade clicked with light. Why hadn’t he put the knife under his pillow? Terry thought. Why did Wyatt have to put his filthy hands on it?

“Carl promoted you?” Wyatt said.

  “I’m information officer, if you want to know.”

“Going over to Idaho? Meet all them groups at Hayden Lake?”

“Maybe. If Carl tells me to.”

Wyatt sat down in a chair and fiddled with the German dagger, never removing it all the way from the sheath. Then he tossed it to Terry.

“I noticed you been coughing a bit. I’m gonna introduce you to a woman used to be a whore down by the railway tracks,” Wyatt said. “Why do I want to meet
her?”

“She thinks she might know you from the clinic. You call to mind a woman looks like she was just dug up from a cemetery?”

“I don’t know what’s going on, Wyatt.”

“I’ll pick you up at seven. Maybe we’ll check out the Voss girl again. Or maybe that female private detective. I told Mr. Holland he’d know when it was my ring.”

“Carl says it’s a bad time for stirring anything up.” “Seven o’clock,” Wyatt said.

THAT SAME MORNING Temple and I ate breakfast together in a cafe across from the train yard, then walked down Higgins toward the river. Two city police cars had pulled up in front of a saloon, their flashers on, and two uniformed officers had gotten out and were approaching a man who sat like a pile of wet hay on the curb. The officers slipped their batons into the rings on their belts and leaned over and tried to talk with the man on the curb.

It was one of those moments when, if your life is fairly sane and you’re able to greet the day with a clear eye and enjoy the simple pleasure of reading the newspaper over a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal, you thank the Creator or Yahweh or the Great Spirit or the Buddha or Our Lord Jesus you are not the wretch whose fate seems so awful that no reasonable human being could deliberately choose it for himself.

Xavier Girard’s clothes looked as if they had been stolen off a washline. His face was puffed, his eyes like sliced beets; his mouth hung open as though he had just witnessed a train wreck. He vomited between his legs, then stared stupidly at the splatter on his tennis shoes.

But even from across the street and in his drunken state Xavier recognized me and pushed himself out of the policemen’s grasp and stumbled into the traffic, where he was almost hit by a milk truck.

He came toward me, waving his arms, a vinegary stench welling up from his armpits.

“Molinari’s goons ripped up all my disks. These fucks won’t do anything about it,” he said, swinging one arm backward to indicate the two policemen who had followed him into the street.

“They look like decent guys. Talk it over with them later,” I said.

“Fuck ‘decent.’ Tell Molinari my new book is titled
The Cuckold Shoves His Horns Through the Greaseball’s Heart,”
Xavier said.

The two policemen got him by each arm again and walked him back across the street, then one of them recrossed the street and stepped up on the curb.

“You know this guy?” he asked.

“Yep.”

“We got a full house. You want to take care of him?” he said.

“Nope,” I said.

“I had a feeling you might say that.”

Later, Temple and I went back to her motel. I sat in a stuffed chair and turned on CNN while she went into the bath and brushed her teeth. When she came out I noticed she had taken off her earrings and her gold watch and the barrette from her hair. The blinds were closed but the sunlight glowed around the edges of the slats and touched her face and accentuated the girl-like quality of her mouth and the mysterious beauty of her eyes, which I had never understood, no more than you can understand the strange hold a tree-shaded green river can have on you, the way that its depths, the thickness of its color, and the warmth of its current can swell above your loins and arouse an undefined longing in you that makes you feel you do not know who you really are.

I stood up from the chair and removed a small blue velvet box from my pocket.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“I happened to be passing by the jewelry store yesterday and this caught my eye.”

She looked up at me, and I saw the color grow in her cheeks and her face become smaller and her eyes fix mine in such a way that I could hardly look back at the box in my hand.

I opened the top against the stiffness of the spring and removed the ring and lifted her hand and put the ring on her finger and slipped it over the knuckle and folded her fingers down into her palm.

“You can take it back if it doesn’t fit. Or, if you don’t want it, we can just return it and get a refund,” I said.

“Get a refund?”

“Yeah, I sort of did this without taking a vote.”

She pushed one loafer off, then the other, and stood on top of my feet and tilted her head sideways and closed her eyes and placed her mouth on mine. Then her arms were around my neck and she tightened her stomach and breasts against me, and when she took her mouth away from mine her eyes were open, as though she doubted her power to take my heart. I kissed her again and ran my hands down her back and breathed the fragrance of her hair and skin and the perfume on her neck. I took off her blouse and unbuttoned her jeans and pulled back the bedspread and laid her down on the sheets and removed her socks and worked her jeans off her legs and sat beside her and kissed her breasts, her nipples, her throat, her eyes and cheeks, her baby fat, her back, her hair, then I stroked the inside of her thighs and traced her sex and the smooth taper of her stomach and hips and the perfect lines of her breasts.

“Billy Bob?” she said.

“What?”

“Do you want to take off your clothes?”

I undressed and lay beside her, then I looked once more into the green mystery of her eyes and I finally knew what it was that made her eyes different from any other woman’s on Earth. Their depth had no bottom; they went straight into the soul, and they contained no guile, no fear, no regret, and no doubt about the intentions of her heart. I leaned over and took one of her nipples into my mouth and worked my palm under the small of her back and entered the space between her thighs, where her hand received my sex and placed it inside her while her mouth parted and only a whisper of sound came out. Then I was inside Temple Carrol again, the feathery touch of her breath against my cheek, her fingers deep into my back, and I felt the two of us slip as one into a valley of buttercups and green grass and sun showers that she had created for both of us simply by widening her thighs and raising her knees and turning her face like a new flower up to mine.

AN   HOUR   LATER,   while Temple was in the shower, the phone rang on the nightstand.

“This is the front desk. Was Ms. Carrol expecting a guest?” a young man’s voice said.

“Not that I know of. Is something wrong?” I said. “A man cruised through the lot twice. He stopped by your door. He backed up and down, like he was trying to see through the window.”

“What kind of car did this guy have?”

“You can see for yourself. He’s parked across the street. In a red car with the radiator showing.”

I went outside and walked to the edge of the street and looked through the traffic into the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant. Wyatt Dixon stared back at me from behind his steering wheel. His face was mirthless, the idiot’s grin gone, his features like dried putty. He threw whatever he was eating out the window, onto the pavement, and started his engine and rumbled into the street. He turned his head and stared at me for only a second, but I think I saw the real Wyatt Dixon for the first time. The downturned mouth, the hollow eyes, the sensual flesh that had hardened against the facial bones, were like a Stygian image from a dream suddenly released into daylight.

Temple walked up behind me and glanced up and down the street.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“A guy who’s been looking for a bullet a long time,” I said.

ON THE WAY HOME, passing through the little town of Victor, Wyatt Dixon saw Carl Hinkel’s truck parked in front of the barbershop. Wyatt Dixon pulled into the grocery down the street and bought a half-gallon container of ice cream and sat bare-chested on the high sidewalk in the shade of a tack and feed store and ate the ice cream with a metal spoon. It was a fine day, the mountains shining in the sun, the breeze cool on Wyatt’s skin. But he couldn’t enjoy it, not even the ice cream that slid in cold lumps down his throat. One obsession had haunted all his thoughts, ruined his sleep, woke him in the morning like a vulture on his bedpost, and tainted every moment and pleasure in his day.

The woman at the clinic had given him both an oral and a blood test. But it would be three weeks before he could receive even tentative assurance that he was not HIV positive, and the nurse had said something about an incubation period that would delay any certain knowledge of his status for another three months.

Wyatt wanted to tear Terry Witherspoon apart. But that was too easy. Terry expected abuse, got high on it, and used it to feed his bitchiness. Wyatt had special plans for Terry, a date with destiny that’d make him wish his mama had stuffed him hot and smoking down the family honey hole. But in the meantime he had plenty of substitutes to do a number on. Mr. Holland and his girlfriend were ripe for some fine-tuning and that war hero, Dr. Voss, could use straightening out as well. But right now Wyatt’s mind was on Carl, who had convinced all his neighbors he was a stomp-ass paratrooper. Right.

Carl came out of the barbershop, his boots shined, his seersucker slacks pressed, a Stetson at a rakish angle on his head, his western-cut coat puffing open in the wind.

Wyatt cleaned off his spoon in his mouth and dropped off the high sidewalk into the street and stuck the spoon down into the side pocket of his jeans. Carl stood in the shade of the nineteenth-century brick-front buildings and gazed at the Bitterroots rising up out of pastureland into the sky. Always posing as the patriarch, Wyatt thought, the gentleman rancher who turned no patriot from his door, the prophet who gave voice to folks who’d had their rights stolen by the government.

Maybe it was time Carl got a lesson in humbleness.

Wyatt squeezed his scrotum and started toward the barbershop, when a maroon Cadillac convertible and a tan Honda pulled up on each side of Carl’s truck and four greaseballs got out and approached Carl with smiles on their faces, like they were all old friends. The greaseballs formed a circle around him, a couple of them glancing over their shoulders to see if anyone had taken notice, Carl flinching in the middle of the circle like one of the greaseballs was about to pop him in the face.

Well, ain’t this a pistol? Wyatt thought. He removed a toothpick from his hatband and leaned back against the coolness of the elevated sidewalk and cleaned his fingernails while Carl was bundled into the Honda. For just an instant Carl seemed to look between two of the men pushing him into the backseat and see Wyatt watching him. Wyatt laughed to himself and slipped the toothpick into his mouth and walked up the cement steps into the grocery store, past the sign that said NO SHIRT, NO SHOES, NO SERVICE, and pulled a six-pack of beer from the cooler and paid the clerk.