Bitterroot (44 page)

“You mind if I borrow your truck?” he asked.

“You didn’t answer my question,” I said.

“Like you say, maybe he holed up and died in a canyon somewheres. See you later, Billy Bob. It don’t matter what you do. I love you just the same,” he replied.

SUNDAY MORNING Temple and I drove up the Blackfoot into the Swan Valley to look at property. The lakeside areas and the campgrounds along the river were full of picnickers and fishermen and canoeists, and we walked with a real estate agent along the shore of Swan Lake and I stood in a copse of shaggy larch that was cold with shadow and cast a wet fly out into the sunlight and watched it sink over a ledge into a pool dissected by elongated dark shapes that crisscrossed one another as quickly as arrows fired from a bow.

Something hit my leader so hard it almost jerked the Fenwick out of my hand. The line flew off my reel through the guides and the tip of my rod bent to the water’s surface before I could strip more line off the reel, then suddenly the rod was weightless, the leader cut with the cleanness of a razor.

“What was that?” Temple asked.

“A big pike, I suspect,” I replied.

“We have to get us a place here, Billy Bob.”

“Absolutely.”

I looked at the severed end of my leader. The air seemed colder in the shade now, damp, the sunlight out on the water brittle and hard.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“I don’t want to leave Lucas alone,” I replied.

BUT MY ANXIETIES about my son seemed groundless. When we got back to Doc’s he was sitting on the front porch, the belly of his Martin propped across his thigh, singing,

“I wish they’d stop makin’ them ole pinball machines.

They’ve caused me to live on crackers and sardines. “

“Everything okay, Doc?” I said in the kitchen.

“The sheriff called. He said Wyatt Dixon’s car was found in a ditch the other side of the Canadian line. No sign of Dixon,” he replied. He was washing dishes, with an apron tied around his waist, and his arms were wet up to the elbows.

“What’s your read on it?” I asked.

“I think Dixon and General Giap would have gotten along just fine. When the NVA drew us into Khe Sanh, Sir Charles tore up Saigon.”

“Maybe Dixon’s not that smart,” I said.

“Right,” he said, and threw me a dish towel. Outside the window I saw a flock of magpies rise from the top of a cottonwood and freckle the sky.

LATER we would discover he had boosted the skinned-up brown truck outside a pulp mill in Frenchtown, west of Missoula. How his own car ended up in Canada no one would ever know. But during the night Wyatt Dixon had crossed the Blackfoot above us and slept in a campground, dressing the wound in his chest, from which he had extracted the knife blade with a pair of needle-nose pliers, eating candy bars and drinking chocolate milk for strength.

He had snaked his way across Forest Service land and parked in a low spot sheltered by trees on the river and watched the front of Doc’s house through binoculars, a .44 Magnum revolver on the seat, waiting until he could assess who was home and who was not.

He watched me and Temple leave and return. Then he saw Doc and Maisey come outside together and walk past Lucas and get in Doc’s truck and drive through the field in back and return a few minutes later with a horse trailer they had bought from a neighbor.

Wyatt Dixon could feel himself growing weaker, see the inflammation in his wound spreading beyond the edges of the bandages on his chest. He pulled the tape loose and poured from a bottle of peroxide into the gauze. He watched the peroxide and the infection it had boiled out of the wound seep down his stomach.

Time was running out, he thought. All because he had let a jail bitch like Terry get a shank in him. Maybe if he was that dumb he deserved to be cooled out. He shook his head in dismay and finished a carton of chocolate milk and pitched the carton out the window.

Then the moment came. Raindrops ticked on the canopy overhead and sprinkled the surface of the river with interlocking rings, as though hundreds of trout were feeding on a sudden fly hatch. Lucas stood up from the steps and put his Martin inside its case and snapped down the latches, then carried the guitar in its case down to his tent on the riverbank and got inside and pulled the flap shut. A moment later Dogus scratched on the flap and went inside, too.

Wyatt Dixon fired up his truck and floored it out of the trees, snapping the wire on a fence, scouring dirt and pinecones into the air. The steering wheel spun crazily in his hands, then he righted the truck and bore down on the tent, shifting into second gear now, the truck’s body bouncing on the springs, the cleated tires thumping across rocks and driftwood.

The truck tore through Lucas’s tent, splintering the poles, crushing Lucas’s guitar case, blowing cook-ware and fire ashes and camp gear in all directions. But Wyatt Dixon’s efforts were to no avail. While he had come powering out of the woods, he had not seen Lucas exit the opposite side of the tent with Dogus and walk down to the water’s edge to cast a spinner into the riffle.

Wyatt Dixon braked the truck and stared through the back window at Lucas, who had dropped his rod and picked up a piece of driftwood the thickness and length of a baseball bat. I was out on the porch now and I saw Wyatt Dixon shift into reverse, the front of his beige shirt stained as though he had left an open bottle of Mercurochrome in his pocket. I cocked L.Q.‘s revolver and fired at the truck without aiming.

The round cut a hole in the back window and exited the windshield and whined away in the woods. I gripped the revolver with two hands and steadied my arm against a post and sighted on the side of Wyatt Dixon’s face, then squeezed the trigger. But the shot was low and must have hit the steering wheel. Dixon’s hands flew into the air as though they had been scalded.

He shifted into first and drove into the field, headed for the dirt road and the log bridge that would take him across the river. I walked into the yard and fired until the cylinder was empty, the recoil jerking my wrists upward with each shot, my ears almost deaf now. The entry holes on the truck cab looked like dented silver coins embedded in the metal.

I watched the truck grow smaller in the distance and I thought Wyatt Dixon had eluded us again. Then the truck swayed out of the track and cruised through a long swath of Indian paintbrush and came to a stop six inches from the trunk of an aspen tree.

I went back into the house and removed a box of hollow-point .45 rounds from the kitchen table and shucked out the spent shells from
L.Q.‘s cylinder and began reloading. Temple and
Doc were out in the backyard, staring at the truck in the distance. Doc worked the bolt on his Springfield rifle and ejected a spent cartridge in the dirt and locked down the bolt again. The keys to his pickup were on the table. I picked them up and dropped them into the drawer I had taken the box of .45 rounds from and closed the drawer, just as Doc entered the room.

“Where you going?” Temple said.

“I’ll check on our man. Y’all call the sheriff’s office,” I said.

“He’s alive in there, Billy Bob. The truck stopped because Doc hit the engine,” Temple said.

“Really?” I said, and went out the front door before they could say anything else and drove into the field.

Through the rain I could see Wyatt Dixon moving around inside the cab of his truck. The wind had grown cold and torn pieces of cloud hung in the hills, like smoke rising out of the trees. In the rearview mirror I saw Doc and Temple and Lucas standing in the yard, like three figures trapped inside an ink wash.

I cut my engine just as Wyatt Dixon opened the passenger door on his truck and half fell into the weeds. He raised himself to one knee and reached for the .44 Magnum that now lay on the floorboards. I grabbed him by the shirt and pulled him away from the cab, and was surprised at the level of his physical weakness. He tried to get up but fell again, then pushed himself up against the rear tire, his face bloodless, his eyes blinking against the rain.

“Are you hit?” I asked.

He shook his head and breathed through his mouth, as though he were trying to oxygenate his blood. His eyes looked up at the revolver in my hand, then at my face.

“I told you, you’d know when it was my ring,” he said. His teeth showed at the edge of his mouth when he smiled.

“I got a problem, Wyatt. I’m afraid you’ll be on the street again one day.”

“Folks love a rodeo clown. They don’t got no love for lawyers.”

“Why’d you bury Temple?”

“It made me feel good.”

I squatted down next to him, L.Q.‘s revolver propped across my thigh.

“You a praying man?” I asked.

“My daddy was. I never took to it.”

“Your clock’s run out, partner.”

He nodded and looked out into the rain. “Give me my hat.”

“Pardon me?”

“My hat. It fell on the floor. I want my damn hat.”

I reached inside the open passenger door and picked up a white Stetson with a gray feather in the band and knocked the dust off it against my thigh and handed it to him. He pulled it down on his head and stared out under the brim into the field of flowers. His shirt was buttoned at the throat, and the flesh under his chin looked old, wrinkled, peppered with white whiskers.

I knelt on one knee, three feet from him, and pointed L.Q.‘s .45 at his jawbone.

“My notion is nobody knows what goes on inside a man like you. But all your life you look for a bullet. If need be, you make the state your executioner,” I said.

He turned his head slowly toward me, the pain rippling upward into his face.

“I ain’t afraid of no man. Do it and be done. I’ll live in your dreams, motherfucker,” he said.

I removed a hollow-point round from L.Q.‘s revolver and dropped it into his lap.

“That’s why you’re going into a cage, Wyatt, where somebody can study you, the way they would a gerbil. We plan to have a good life. You won’t be part of it, either.”

I stood up and felt the bones pop in my knees. I steadied myself against the side of the truck, kicking the stiffness loose from one leg, like a man who knows he’s a little older, a little more worn around the edges, a little more prone to let the season have its way.

I got into my truck and drove through the rain toward Lucas and Temple and Doc and Maisey, who were walking toward me under a huge red umbrella, indifferent to the lightning that split the sky.

Epilogue

WYATT DIXON’S .44 Magnum proved to be the weapon that had killed the biker and rapist Tommy Lee Stoltz. The death of the third rapist, the one who was found drowned in his chest waders, was written off as accidental. But I suspect Carl Hinkel ordered the attack against Maisey as a way of hurting her father, then, after Lamar Ellison was killed, had the other two men murdered in order to hide his own culpability.

But we’ll never know the entire truth of what happened. Wyatt Dixon went to trial and gave up no one, even though he was facing a capital sentence. Oddly, the jury seemed to like him. At least two female jurors couldn’t keep their eyes off him. When Dixon was sentenced to sixty years in Deer Lodge, he drew himself to attention and saluted the judge and called him a great American.

Terry Witherspoon confessed to burying Temple alive, not out of remorse but to incriminate Dixon and pile as much time on him as he could. The irony is that while Witherspoon was hospitalized in a body cast, his bloodwork came back HIV positive. Dixon may leave prison one day but Witherspoon will not.

I received a letter from Xavier Girard, written from the same penitentiary where Dixon and Witherspoon were being held. It was short and did not contain either the litany of grief or the self-pronounced redemption that is characteristic of most people who have made a holocaust of their lives. It read:

Dear Mr. Holland,

I wanted to apologize for making a nuisance of myself. You seemed like a nice gentleman and I’m sure you had more to do than put up with a lot of grandiose and silly behavior from an expatriate coonass.

I’ve given up fiction for a while and have gone back to writing poetry. I think some of my new poems are pretty good. I can’t say I’ve learned very much in here, unless an old truth that I knew as a young man and forgot as I reached my middle years. A writer’s art is only as good as his devotion to it. I forgot that I didn’t do anything to earn my talent. I burned my own kite but I hurt a lot of other people as well.

Come see me anytime in the next few decades. I’ll be here.

Please consider this letter an apology to Ms. Carrol as well.

Best to you both,                                                                     Xavier Girard

After the charges against Doc were dropped, Temple and Lucas and I drove back to Texas through the northern tip of New Mexico and stopped for the night at Clayton, a short distance from the Texas state line. We walked from the motel at the end of what had been a scorching day to a nineteenth-century hotel named the Eklund and had dinner in a dining room paneled with hand-carved mahogany. The hotel was three stories, built of quarried stone, anchored in the hardpan like a fortress against the wind, but the guest rooms had long ago been boarded up and the check-in desk and boxes for mail and metal keys abandoned to dust and cobweb.

On the wall of the small lobby was a framed photograph of the outlaw Black Jack Ketchum being fitted with a noose on a freshly carpentered scaffold. Another photograph showed him after the trapdoor had collapsed under his feet. Ketchum was dressed in a black suit and white shirt and his face showed no expression in the moments before his death, as though he were a witness to a predictable historical event rather than a participant in it.

Most of the patrons entering or leaving the dining room were local people and took no notice of the photographic display.