Bitterroot (28 page)

She was attentive, motionless, her head lowered slightly, while the sheriff played the first four. Then he put the fifth cassette into the machine and hit the play button. The voice was Wyatt Dixon’s, but without dramatic emphasis, devoid of the manufactured and startled tone that characterized his speech. Temple raised her head, as though she were going to speak, then she motioned the sheriff to play the sixth tape.

“There ain’t no hurry. You want me to play any of them again?” the sheriff asked.

“Number two and five,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

She listened again, then nodded, her lips crimping together.

“It’s number two,” she said.

The sheriff slapped the back of his head and blew out his breath.

“No?” she said.

“You just picked out my deputy,” the sheriff said. He looked at me, his cheeks puffed with air.

“Don’t say what I think you’re fixing to,” I said.

“I got to kick him loose. Terry Witherspoon got rid of the pipe tape you called me about. There are no latents in Ms. Carrol’s vehicle. Three or four people over in Billings are willing to swear Dixon was at the rodeo when Ms. Carrol was abducted,” he said.

“Which people in Billings?” I asked.

“A prostitute and Carl Hinkel and a couple of ex-convicts. He don’t hang out with your regular civic club types.”

“Talk to them about the consequences for perjury. Bring in Witherspoon. Put him in a cell full of Indians and blacks and lose his paperwork,” I said.

“Come on, Ms. Carrol, I’ll walk you to your car,” the sheriff said, ignoring me.

“I can manage, thank you,” she replied.

“Don’t misinterpret the gesture. I’m just going across the street to buy my grandson a birthday present. Counselor, one way or another I’m gonna put Wyatt Dixon and this Witherspoon kid out of business. But in the meantime they’d better remain the healthiest pair of white trash in Missoula County. We clear on this?”

“Not really,” I said.

He hooked on his glasses and studied the calendar on his desk.

“You got about three weeks before Dr. Voss goes to trial for Lamar Ellison’s murder. Why don’t you turn your attentions to your profession and quit pretending you’re still a lawman?” he said.

“Don’t you dare speak down to him like that. He was a Texas Ranger. In the old days he and his partner would have fed Wyatt Dixon into a hay baler,” Temple said.

The sheriff flexed his dentures and tried to obscure his face when he fitted on his hat, but he could not hide the embarrassed light in his eyes.

THAT NIGHT Lucas returned late from Sue Lynn’s house. Through my bedroom window I saw him build a fire by his tent and squat next to the flames and slice open a can with his pocketknife and pour the contents into a skillet. I put on a coat and walked down to the riverbank and sat on a stump behind him without his hearing me.

“Lordy, you give me a start!” he said when he saw me.

 “Guilty conscience?” I said.

He stirred the corned beef hash in the skillet and sprinkled red pepper on it. “You was born for the pulpit, Billy Bob,” he said.

“Go back home, Lucas.”

“I’ve done fell in love with Montana. I’m thinking of transferring up here to the university.”

The woods were dark, the larch trees shaggy with moss. An animal, perhaps the cougar that had been getting into the pet bowls, growled somewhere on the other side of the river. Lucas shifted his weight and stared into the darkness, one knee crimping into the pine needles on the ground, his young face and long-sleeved cream-colored shirt painted with the light from the fire. I looked at the innocence in his face and his refusal to show fear, and felt again my old inadequacy as his father.

But before I could speak, he said, “You believe in hell, Billy Bob?”

“I can’t rightly say.”

“Sue Lynn thinks she’s going there.”

“What has she done that’s so terrible?”

“She has this nightmare all the time. It might make sense to you, but I sure cain’t cipher it out.”

THE WORLD of Sue Lynn Big Medicine’s sleep seemed more a collective record of her people than a dream. There was no historical date on the scene nor many particular names associated with it, but the season was summer and the hills above the river were treeless and golden in the heat, the water down in the river basin milky green, tepid to the touch, the surface flecked with cottonwood bloom.

The column of soldiers came out of the south, the razored blue peaks of distant mountains at their backs. They wore gray hats that were damp and wilted in the heat and blue blouses and trousers with yellow stripes on the legs, and the pommels of their saddles were strung with wooden canteens that clunked against the leather. The soldiers’ blouses were sun-faded and stiff with salt, puffed in the hot wind, and their trousers so dark with sweat against their saddles that the soldiers looked as if they had fouled themselves.

The Crow scouts rode at the head of the column with an officer who was dressed differently from the rest. His boots were polished and flared at the knees, his trousers skintight, his yellow hair longer than a woman’s, his hat festooned with bird plumes. The sun danced on the nickel plate of his English Bulldog revolvers. An ethereal light seemed to glow in his face, and he breathed the wind as though the chaff and dust in it were simply the embellishments on a grand day in history that was of his own manufacture.

The Crow horses pitched their heads, the nostrils dilating, the eyes protruding like walnuts, then they whirled in circles, fighting against the bit as though snakes lay in the golden grass that grew up the slope of the hill. The cottonwoods on the river were empty of birds, the buffalo briefly visible on the horizon, then gone. Magpies clattered in an arroyo, pulling shreds of meat from the exposed ribs of an elk that had already been butchered and skinned with stone knives.

The wind changed and a familiar odor struck the noses of the Crow scouts, a dense mixture of woodsmoke, horses hobbled among shade trees, animal hides curing over fires piled with willow branches and wet leaves, and churned mud flats that were now green and slick with feces in the sun.

The Crow were the first to reach the crest of the hill. What they saw in the valley below them turned them to stone.

The wickiups along the river and up the arroyos numbered in the thousands. These were all Sioux and Northern Cheyenne, the enemies of the Crow, but for just a moment the scouts wished the Crow were part of the assemblage, too, because surely the red people now had enough numbers to drive the white men back across the mountains to a place in the East where all the white man’s diseases and his greed and his treachery came from.

The officer who was different from all the others joined them, his face impassive, his profile motionless against the hard blue background of the sky. His hair hung in ringlets on his shoulders, and he wiped the dampness off his throat with a kerchief and raised himself slightly in the stirrups, the leather creaking under him, in order to form a better view of the valley.

The Crow waited, not speaking, their faces as flat and empty of emotion as potter’s clay. They had long ago learned not to speak to the officer unless he addressed them first. His anger was of a quiet kind that burned just below the skin, but his capacity for cruelty was legendary. The kitchen tent had been converted to a workshop where the officer indulged his hobby of stuffing the animals and birds he shot while his men ate cold rations. A soldier who stole a dried apple from a supply wagon was shaved bald and not allowed to mount his horse for one hundred miles. Three deserters were forced to kneel, then were shot to death at point-blank range.

Another officer, this one young, the exposed skin of his chest emblazoned with a V-shaped patch of sunburn, rode forward from the column, posting in the saddle.

“Sir?” he said, sweat running through his eyebrows.

But the officer who was different, whom the Indians called the Son of the Morning Star, did not answer.

“Sir?” the younger officer repeated.

“What?”

“What are your orders, sir?”

The Son of the Morning Star pulled off his fringed gloves and rubbed the tips of his fingers against the heel of his right hand, as though enjoying the feel of the oil in his skin.

“Why, young man, I’m very glad you asked that. I think I’m going to take an elk’s tooth off a squaw’s dress today,” he said.

The younger officer let the focus go out of his eyes to hide his recognition of the senior officer’s implication.

Big Medicine, the spokesman for the Crow scouts, glanced at his friends, then backed his horse away from the crest until he was abreast of the Son of the Morning Star.

“We go down there?” Big Medicine asked. “They’re ours for the taking, my painted friend,” the Son of the Morning Star said.

“We go down there, in that valley, we sing death song first,” he said.

“Then you are cowards and you do not belong on this hill. Be gone from my sight,” the Son of the Morning Star replied.

But the three Crow did not move. The Son of the Morning Star was scribbling in a book filled with blank pages. He tore a page with a single line on it from the book and handed it to a messenger. “Can you read what that says?” he asked. “Yes, sir. ‘Hurry—bring packs,’” the messenger replied.

“Take these cowards back with you. They dishonor sacred ground,” the Son of the Morning Star said.

The Crow scouts looked at one another again, then rode their horses in file past the senior officer, their eyes straight ahead, the coup feathers in their hair stiffening and flattening in the wind.

But Big Medicine reined his horse and turned it in a circle and pulled a heavy, cap-and-ball Army-issue revolver from a holster strapped across his chest. He clenched the revolver by the barrel and flung it spinning down the hill.

“The Shyelas hate Son of the Morning Star for all the women and children and old ones he killed on the Washita. You will take no button off a squaw’s clothes today. Instead your spirit will travel the Ghost Trail without ears to listen or sight to see,” he said.

If the senior officer heard, he gave no sign. His posture in the saddle was regal, his thoughts already deep in the battle that was about to take place. The Crow disappeared down the slope, through the golden fields of yellow grass, out of history, while the long column of sweat-soaked soldiers rode past them toward the senior officer and the crest of the hill and the panorama of sky and cottonwoods on a lazy green river and thousands of deerhide wickiups that teemed with families who never thought they would be attacked by a military force as small as the one now flowing over the hill’s crest.

But the next events in Sue Lynn Big Medicine’s dream broke with history and reason. Even though she was a Crow, she was inside the encampment of Sioux and Northern Cheyenne and saw the attack through their eyes rather than through her people’s.

The soldiers rode down the valley with a recklessness that the Indians could not believe, firing pistols and rifles from their saddles into the wickiups, splitting their column down the middle to encircle the Indians as though they were about to round up livestock. She heard toppling rounds whirring past her head and saw the stitched deerhide on the wickiup she had just exited pop and snap on the lodge poles that supported it.

She raced back inside and saw her ten-year-old brother sitting on a buffalo robe, holding the flat of his palm against his mouth. He removed his hand and stared at it and at the circle of blood in the center of it, then looked at her and grinned and put his fingers to the small hole in his chest. She sank to both knees in front of him, while bullets from the soldiers’ guns tore through the wickiup, and held both his hands in hers and watched the focus go out of his eyes and the pallor of death invade his cheeks.

When she rose to her feet the streaks of blood on her hands felt as hot as burns. She wiped the blood on her face and hair and went outside into the swirl of dust from the soldiers’ horses and the running of people from the wickiups. Up the slope she saw the officer the Indians called the Son of the Morning Star. Many of his men were down now, running for the hilltop behind them, their horses gut-shot and writhing in the grass, but the Son of the Morning Star was still mounted and only yards from the edge of the village, the bit sawed back in his horse’s mouth, while he fired one ball after another from his revolvers.

But his courage or his devotion to killing Indians or his grandiose belief in himself, whatever quality or vice had allowed him to remain unscathed in years of warfare, suddenly had no application in the maelstrom he had ridden into. His men, mostly German and Irish immigrants from the slums of the East, many who had never heard a shot fired in anger, were now forming a ragged perimeter on the hilltop, their noncommissioned officers screaming orders at men whose hands shook so badly they could hardly throw the breech on their rifles.

The Son of the Morning Star rode after his men, firing back over his horse’s rump to cover their retreat, his heels slashing into his horse’s ribs, his face filled with rage, as though history were betraying him. Then the Indians surged out of the encampment, with arrows and bows and coup sticks and Spencer and Henry repeaters and steel hatchets and stone axes and bundles of fire they dragged on ropes behind their horses.

The squaws ferreted out the wounded who tried to hide in the cattails along the river and mutilated them with knives. The wind was blowing out of the south, and the fires climbed up the hill where the surviving soldiers were kneeling in the grass and shooting down the slope. Many of the soldiers had carried whiskey in their canteens and now had no water. The dust and smoke swirled over them, and down the hill they heard the screams of their friends inside the burning grass, saw blackened shapes trying to rise like crippled birds from the flames. Some of the soldiers on the hill inverted their pistols and discharged them into their mouths.

Inside it all the Son of the Morning Star fired his nickel-plated revolvers at the Indians, who now had broken through his perimeter and were clubbing his men to death with stone axes, cracking skulls and jawbones apart as if they were clay pots. The Indians swept across the top of the hill, and the Son of the Morning Star fell to one knee, like a medieval knight giving allegiance to a king, an arrow quivering in his rib cage. The squaws thronged up the incline, their throats warbling with birdsong.