Bitterroot (24 page)

As he walked back to his house he saw car lights through a stand of lodgepole pine on the neighbor’s property, but the lights disappeared and he gave them no more thought. He slit the belly of his fish under an outside faucet and raked out the guts and threw them to one of Carl’s cats, then he scrubbed his hands clean under the faucet and threaded a stick through the trout’s gills and mouth and went inside his house.

Just inside the doorway a piece of bronze wire glistened once on the edge of his vision, then looped over his head and tightened around his neck, squeezing tendon and artery, shutting off air to his lungs and blood to his brain.

He lost both his sight and his consciousness as though he were watching a red-black liquid slide down the lens of a camera.

When he awoke his head snapped upward, like that of a man rising from a coffin, and the room, with all its familiar gunracks and deer and elk antlers and assortment of western hats and Indian blankets on the furniture and logs burning in the woodstove, came back into focus, everything in its right place, even the plastic suction device on the kitchen table that he used to clean impurities from the pores of his facial skin.

He realized he was seated in a chair and the wire loop that had razored into his flesh was no longer around his throat but on the floor by his foot and he saw that the loop had been fashioned from guitar strings. But his arms had been pinioned behind the chair and his wrists crossed and taped together, and his calves were secured to the chair’s legs with wide strips of silver tape from his ankle to the knee. He looked at the intruder who sat on a straight-back wood chair no more than three feet from him.

“Howdy do, sir? My name is Wyatt Dixon. What might yours be?” he said.

“You don’t know?” the intruder said.

“My guess is you’re Maisey Voss’s daddy. If that be the case, I’m honored to meet a decorated soldier such as yourself. That Bowie knife on your hip could saw the head off a hog, couldn’t it?”

“You were going back into the men’s room at the truck stop to buy rubbers?” Doc said.

“That’s not a fit question to be asking a man, sir.”

“You planned to rape my daughter.”

“Some weight lifters or football farts, I don’t know which, was trying to get into her pants. Excuse the language I use to describe what could have been a repeat scene for your poor little girl. But that’s what happened, sir.”

“What I don’t understand about you is that evidently you’re a brave man. Cruel people are almost always cowards. How would you explain the discrepancy, Mr. Dixon?”

“I can tell you are Mr. Holland’s friend. You both are natural-born orators. Your speech is filled with philosophic content that is far beyond the understanding of a rodeo cowboy.”

Doc got up from his chair and walked to the butane cookstove that was set in a small curtain-hung alcove that served as a kitchen. He turned the butane on and listened to it hiss through the unlit jets, then turned it off.

“It won’t give you no satisfaction,” Wyatt Dixon said.

“Why not?” Doc asked.

“‘Cause you’ll have given me power. ‘Cause I’ll live in you every morning you get up. Ask them who run Old Sparky at Huntsville Pen. They don’t never eat breakfast alone.”

“That doesn’t apply to you?” Wyatt Dixon’s silky red hair hung in his eyes like a little boy’s. He shifted his weight on his small, hard buttocks and wet his lips.

“There’s people that’s different. We all know each other, though. It’s a bigger club than you might think,” Wyatt Dixon said.

“I think you’ve convinced me, Mr. Dixon.”

“I don’t rightly follow you, sir. But I have to say I’m in awe of your military background. You had Lamar Ellison spotting his drawers.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Doc replied. The woodstove was inset in an old stone hearth. Doc picked up two chunks of split pine from the woodbox and opened the stove’s doors and threw them on the fire. Then he opened the damper on the chimney and watched the flame bloom inside the stove’s iron walls.

All the while Wyatt Dixon watched him as though he were a spectator rather than a participant in the events taking place around him.

“Cut me loose and give me a knife and let’s see how it shapes up. I’m making a bona fide gentleman’s offer to you, sir,” he said.

But Doc had walked past Wyatt Dixon’s line of vision and was now at the cookstove again, where this time he reached behind it and ripped a length of flex pipe from a steel container. Suddenly the smell of butane filled the room.

“I can see you are a man of purpose, sir,” Wyatt Dixon said. “Was you in that bunch over there that would slip into a village and cut people’s throats in their sleep and paint their faces yellow so their folks would get a major surprise at daylight?”

When Doc went out the door and closed it behind him, Wyatt Dixon was staring at the fire in the woodstove, his face whimsical, as though an idle and insignificant thought were hovering in front of his

eyes.

But whatever passions had driven Doc as a Navy SEAL had become little more than ashes on a dead fire. He came back into the log house and screwed down the valve on the butane tank and opened the windows and filled a plastic bucket in the sink and threw the water on the flames in the woodstove. Smoke billowed up into the room.

Wyatt Dixon watched him with a bead in his eye, his hands opening and closing behind him.

Doc flung the bucket at the sink and walked back outside, leaving the door open behind him.

But just as he started his truck he saw Wyatt Dixon walk out of the door, strands of silver tape hanging from his wrists, a splintered piece of chair leg still bound to the calf of his leg. His silhouette seemed haloed with light and smoke.

“You don’t have it in you, sir. Know what that means? I own you. You and yours. If I’ve a mind, I’ll split your little girl in half and take the bones out of the Holland boy. Once more please pardon my language, but, sir, you done fucked with the devil hisself,” he said.

Chapter

19

“HE’S   A  SATANIST?” I said to Doc the next morning.

“I don’t know what he is,” he replied.

“What have you done, Doc?”

The sun had not broken above the ridgeline and the house was in shadow. Doc picked up his uneaten breakfast and threw it out the back door.

“I’m going into town. You want to come?” he said.

“No,” I said, my anger as thick as a walnut in my throat.

I walked down to Lucas’s tent on the river and crouched down and pulled open the flap. He raised his head up from his sleeping bag.

“Anything wrong?” he asked.

“Doc stoked up Wyatt Dixon. I think you should go back to Deaf Smith.”

 “Why?”

“He made a threatening statement about you and Maisey.”

“Fuck him.”

“I had a feeling you might say that. Excuse me for waking you up.”

“Joan Baez is playing at the university tomorrow night,” he said.

I waited for him to go on.

His eyes shifted off mine. “I told Sue Lynn you give us two tickets. Can you let me have forty dollars?”

I WENT BACK into the house and opened the Mis-soula phone directory and began the long process of trying to contact a federal agent for whom I had no business card. Finally I reached a Treasury Department switchboard in Washington, D.C., and after three transfers was able to leave my name and number.

Then I went to Bob Ward’s Sporting Goods and bought a .38 revolver with a two-inch barrel and a clip-on holster and a box of cartridges.

By that afternoon I had heard nothing back from my inquiry at the Treasury Department.

I called the
Missoulian
and asked for the classified ad department.

“Is there still time to get a two-column boldface in tomorrow’s paper?” I asked.

“Yes, I think we can do that. What do you want it to say?” a woman replied sweetly.

“‘Amos Rackley, Please Get in Touch. Urgent.’ Sign it ‘Billy Bob Holland.’”

“That’s it?” she asked.

“No. Let me make an addition,” I said.

THAT EVENING I picked up Temple at the airport. She had been called back to Texas to testify at a trial and I had not seen her since I had impetuously kissed her in the picnic grounds by the river. When she walked off the plane I felt that the best friend I had on earth had just come back into my life.

“Anything happen while I was gone?” she asked.

“A little bit. Doc garroted Wyatt Dixon with Lucas’s guitar strings and taped him to a chair and came within an inch of blowing up him and his house with butane gas.”

“You’re making this up?”

“I wish Doc had finished what he started.”

“Say again?”

“Dixon said he might take Lucas’s bones out. Those are the words he used,” I said, and felt myself swallow.

Temple put her suitcase into the bed of my truck and got into the cab. I started the engine and drove out on the highway. The hills across the river looked low and humped in the sunset and the sky was dull gold and flecked with dark birds. I felt her watching the side of my face.

“Don’t be too hard on Doc,” she said.

“He wants it both ways. He whips a rope on these guys, but he’s not willing to go to the tree with them.”

“You better hope he doesn’t.”

We didn’t speak for several moments. Then I said, “Do you want to have supper?”

“I ate on the plane. Another time, okay?” she said, and smiled wanly.

“Sure,” I said, and pulled into the parking lot of her motel on East Broadway, not far from Hellgate Canyon, which had been named by Jesuit missionaries after they saw the litter of human bones left from the Blackfoot ambushes of the Flatheads.

She hefted her suitcase out of the truck bed and yawned. The wind was cool and the light had gone pink on the trees that grew along the crest of the canyon and I could see white-water rafters bouncing through the rapids on the river.

“Can you come in a minute?” she said.

“Sure,” I said, and walked behind her into her room.

She set her suitcase down and shut the blinds and closed the door and turned on the lights. She sat on the edge of her bed and looked into space for a moment, and I could see the fatigue of the trip seep into her face.

“Maybe I should come back tomorrow,” I said.

   “No, stay,” she said, and pulled off her loafers and unscrewed her earrings and set them on the night-stand. Then she took a breath and smiled and let her eyes rest on mine. “It’s been a long day.”

“I guess it has,” I said, and saw an ice bucket and two drinking glasses on the desk. “I’ll get a couple of sodas if you like.”

“No, that’s all right,” she said, and lifted her large shoulder bag onto her lap. “A friend of mine got ahold of Carl Hinkel’s sheet. I thought we should go over it.”

  “Hinkel’s sheet?”

“Yeah. This guy recruits ex-cons like Lamar Ellison and Wyatt Dixon over the Internet. He was a college professor once, can you believe that?”

“You wanted to go over Hinkel’s sheet?”

“You’d rather not do it now?”

 “Hinkel’s a bucket of shit, Temple. Who cares what his history is?”

“I just don’t believe I’ve come back to this,” she said.

THE NEXT MORNING was Saturday and I went into town by myself and ate steak and eggs in a cafe by the rail yards, then took a walk across the Higgins Street Bridge and along the river by an old train depot that was now used for offices by an environmental group. The walkway by the river was still deep in shadow, the runoff loud through the cottonwoods and willows. I didn’t hear the car that pulled off the bridge and drove down a ramp and stopped behind me.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a car door open and a crew-cut blond man in a suit suddenly running at me, his arm outstretched. I turned and ripped my elbow into his face and felt the bone break in his nose.

He cupped his hands to his face and an unintelligible sound came out of his mouth. His white shirt was splattered with blood and his eyes were filled with pain and rage. His hand went inside his suit coat and closed on the butt of an automatic pistol.

I grabbed his wrist with my left hand and tore my .38 from its clip-on belt holster and slammed him against the front of his car and wedged the .38 into his mouth, my hand still gripped on his wrist. He gagged on the two-inch barrel and I pushed it deeper into his throat, bending him back against the car. Blood and spittle ran from his mouth and I heard the automatic fall from his hand onto the cement.

Then someone pressed a pistol against my temple.

“Let Jim go, Mr. Holland,” Amos Rackley said.

“Kiss my ass. You take that gun away from my head,” I said.

“You’re not in a bargaining position,” he replied.

“Watch this,” I said. I fitted my left hand on the throat of the man called Jim and shoved the .38 deeper into his mouth and cocked the hammer with my thumb, the cylinder actually clacking against his teeth now. “You take your piece away from my head or I’ll empty his brainpan on the hood.”

Rackley lowered his gun. I released the man named Jim and stepped away from him.

“You fucking lunatic,” Rackley said.

“You jump out of cars at people and pull guns on them, this is what you get,” I said.

“What do you call this?” he said, and reached into the backseat of his car and shoved the morning newspaper at me. It was folded back to a red-circled classified ad that read, “Amos Rackley, Please Get in Touch. I Don’t Feel Like Cleaning Up Your Mess— Billy Bob Holland.”

“I think you’re deliberately letting Wyatt Dixon and Carl Hinkel stay in circulation so they’ll lead you to other conspirators in the Oklahoma City bombing. In the meantime they’re hurting innocent people.”

“You just assaulted a federal agent,” he replied.

“There’re must be twenty spectators watching this from the bridge. I wonder what they’ll have to say about who assaulted whom. You want to get a news reporter down here?”

“You’re threatening me?”

“It’s not a threat, Mr. Rackley. You point a gun at me again and I’ll pick your cotton.”