IN THE MORNING I discovered that Cleo had left three messages on Doc’s answering machine. The messages said only that she had gotten to the restaurant late and did not explain why. I called her at home.
“It was Lamar Ellison. I’d gone up to the Indian family’s house to check on the children. He followed me,” she said.
“Ellison? Why’s he coming around you?” I said.
“I don’t know. I saw him on his motorcycle out on the road. The Indians don’t have a phone. I couldn’t get back to the house. It was awful,” she said.
“Did he do anything?”
“No, he just sat out there in the twilight, looking up and down the road. Then he left.”
“I’m coming out,” I said.
“No, I have to go to work. I’ll call you this afternoon.”
“Cleo—”
“I’m sorry. I have to go. I didn’t sleep much last night.”
“Does this have anything to do with your son?”
“How would I know? I just hope this man Ellison dies a horrible death. I hate him,” she said.
I WENT outside and lifted my fly vest and canvas creel off a wood peg on the front porch and put on my hip waders and drove my truck along the dirt road to a spot on the river that was seldom fished. I walked a quarter of a mile through woods and down a soft, green slope where huge gray boulders seemed to grow out of the soil like mushrooms without stems. I waded into the river, which was ice-cold from the melt and lack of sunlight, and fished a deep pool that was fed by a small waterfall.
The days were growing warmer now, and each morning the snow line in the mountain crests was receding and the rivers and creeks were rising and turning from green to copper-colored.
I tied on a royal coachman and coated it with fly dressing and cast it out twenty-five feet into the riffle at the head of the pool. A rainbow rose from the gravel bed and hit the coachman as it floated toward me, high and stiff and flecked with red hackle on top of the riffle.
The rainbow must have been sixteen inches and should have been mine. But just as I saw the strike, like a flickering of quicksilver on top of the current, and jerked up my rod, I heard the loud roar of a motorcycle out on the dirt road. I cut my eyes in the direction of the road and the fly went whipping past my head into a tree limb and the rainbow’s dorsal fin roiled the surface and disappeared.
I saw the rider of the motorcycle pull to the top of a knoll above me and look down at me through the trees. He gunned his engine, the straight exhaust pipe violating the green-gold, pine-scented stillness of the air, reverberating off the boulders on the hillsides and through the gullies that fed into the river.
Then he drove back toward my truck.
I pulled my royal coachman loose from the tree and walked back up the slope toward the road.
The motorcycle driver went past me, looking me full in the face, then turned around a hundred yards down the road. I removed my fly vest and laid it on the hood of my truck and took L.Q. Navarro’s .45 revolver out of the cab and put it under the vest.
Lamar Ellison cut his gas feed and let his bike coast to a stop next to the truck. He slid his sunglasses up on top of his head, his eyes wandering over my person.
His body seemed larger in the shadows of the trees, his bronze skin darker. He swung one leg over the motorcycle seat, like a man getting down from a horse, and stood two feet from me. The wind puffed at his back and I could smell reefer in his clothes and hair and an odor like rotted teeth or decaying meat on his breath. I leaned my fly rod against the truck and rested my forearm on top of my fly vest.
“Say it quick,” I said.
“I didn’t know the guy was a SEAL. I was in the Corps. I’m sorry about his daughter,” he said.
“You didn’t sound that way over the phone.”
He touched at his nose with his wrist and blew air out his nostrils. He glanced up and down the road, and put an unlit cigarette in his mouth, then pulled it back out and stared at it stupidly.
“Other people were listening. It was all flash, man. They got me made for a snitch,” he said.
He was bare-chested except for his cracked, black leather vest. He inserted his hands in his armpits as though he were cold.
“What were you doing up around Cleo Lonnigan’s place?” I asked.
“Looking for you. I got Sue Lynn to call and ask where you was at. Sue Lynn’s an Indian broad who digs bikers. I mean, she’ll pull a train if she has to.”
When I didn’t reply he stuck his hands into his pockets, then refolded his arms across his chest and gripped the outside of his triceps.
“I can’t go back inside, man. I got the Mexican Mafia and the Black Guerrilla Army down on me. When you’re inside, they can reach out anywhere you’re at. The Aryan Brotherhood ain’t always there. The BGA is. Main pop anywhere is seventy percent boon.”
“It’s time for you to go,” I said.
His lips were dry in the shade, the skin of his face grained with dirt. He shifted his weight and dust powdered around his boots. His eyes were like those of a man trying to figure out how to get inside a bus after the doors have been closed on him.
“Two other guys nailed her first. I’ll give them up,” he said.
“Are you that afraid of Doc?”
“I want Witness Protection. I talked to an ATF guy. He made fun of me. He said Voss was in the Phoenix Program. He said Voss would find me and cut off my ears and put out my eyes and paint my face.”
His eyes were dark green, with cinders for pupils, and now they were wet along the rims.
I lifted up L.Q. Navarro’s revolver from under my fly vest and cocked back the hammer.
“You either get out of here now or I’ll shoot your sack off. My hope is that you don’t believe me,” I said.
THAT AFTERNOON I picked Cleo up at her house and we drove toward Flathead Lake to have supper, through ranchland and low hills, along an undulating, boulder-strewn river, into a golden sun. I told her about my encounter with Ellison and the fact that his interest had been in me, not her.
“Why do you believe anything a man like that says?” she asked.
“Because the ATF has obviously jammed him up. Because he’s a coward and could hardly hide his fear. I don’t think he was lying.”
“Why does the ATF care about him?”
“He’s mixed up with this militia bunch. Maybe he’s dealing guns for them.”
We drove through a long, green valley, past the Mission Mountains, whose timbered slopes rose into the clouds. Then I saw Flathead Lake for the first time, so vast it looked like an ocean, its blue water ringed by hills, its eastern shore terraced with cherry orchards. The sun had dropped below the mountains and the air was suddenly cool and touched with rain and the smell of wood smoke, and I looked at the shadow that never seemed to leave Cleo’s eyes and squeezed her hand.
“Why’d you do that?” she said.
“You ever read Ernest Hemingway?” I asked.
“A little.”
“In For Whom the Bell Tolls a Republican guerrilla is about to die on a hilltop in Spain and he tells himself, ‘The world is a fine place and well worth the fighting for.’ I always try to remember that line when I get down with the nature of things,” I said.
We stopped at a restaurant on the eastern shore. It was too cool to eat by the water, but we took a table near the back window where we could see the afterglow of the sun on the hills on the far side of the lake and a steep-sided wooded island where there was a lighted log mansion set inside the trees and a white seaplane was taxiing in a rocky cove at the base of a cliff.
“I might have a chance to buy one of those islands out there,” she said.
“You have that kind of money?” I said.
“Not really. But you only live once, right?”
It started to rain out on the lake, and the string of electric lights over the marina came on and Cleo gazed at the boats rocking in their slips, her thoughts known only to herself.
“This is one of the prettiest places I’ve ever been,” I said.
But she didn’t seem to hear me.
“I talked with an FBI agent about my son once,” she said. “I told him my son was killed on National Forest lands. I thought I could get federal help solving his murder. He called back and said he checked, the body was actually on a state road when it was discovered. I hung up. I couldn’t find words to speak. I’ve always regretted that.”
The waitress brought the wine and poured it into both our glasses. Cleo took a sip, ate a piece of bread, then drank deeply from the glass. When she set it down, her mouth was red, her face striped with shadows from the raindrops that ran down the window. Beyond the marina was a motel built on a promontory above the lake. There was a blue neon sign over the entrance and families were eating in a back dining room that was supported by pilings built into the rock.
“You don’t have to work tomorrow, huh?” I said.
“No.”
“I’m glad.”
“Why?”
“Maybe we could do something together,” I said.
“You’ve never been married?”
“No. I have a son, though. He’s twenty. He goes to Texas A&M.”
“What happened to his mother?”
“She died. She was married to another man when she conceived our son. His name is Lucas. He’s probably one of the best string musicians in the state of Texas.”
The waitress brought our food and went away. The lake was dark now, and a sailboat was anchored out in the chop, its cabin glowing with an oily yellow light. The back door of the restaurant was open to let in the cool air, and I could hear a band playing at the motel up on the promontory.
“That’s Glenn Miller,” I said.
“Montana is a time warp,” she said.
“So are all good places,” I said.
She was quiet for a moment, then she set down her fork and lifted her eyes.
“You’re not eating,” she said.
“I don’t eat much,” I said.
“Billy Bob, you have a tendency to stare at people.”
“Do you want to go?” I said.
“Where?”
“Down the road. Any place you’ve a mind. I don’t care.”
She watched my face, then picked up her purse.
We got into my truck and drove as far as the motel next door. I parked under the porte cochere. Through the lobby window I could see a girl of high school age behind the counter.
“You sure this is what you want?” Cleo said.
“Don’t you?”
She didn’t answer. She opened the truck door for herself and stepped out in the rain. The neon glow on her skin seemed to disfigure her face. For a moment I thought I saw L.Q. Navarro under the porte cochere, raising his hand in a cautionary way.
Inside the room I turned off the lights and sat in a chair and pulled off my boots with the awkwardness of a man who in reality had never been good with intimacy. A crack of light shone through the drawn curtains and I could see her silhouette as she undressed, a bare thigh, a crinkle in her hip as she pushed her panties down over her knees. The window was open and down below we could hear sounds from the gravel parking lot. I took off my trousers and shirt and walked up behind Cleo and placed my hands on her shoulders and started to turn her toward me. But her attention had been captured by the voices that rose on the wind from the parking lot.
“No! Let me alone!” a little boy was shouting.
“You get in the car, Ty!”
“I’m not going. You can’t make me! Get away from me!” the boy yelled.
Cleo held back the curtain, indifferent to her nudity, and stared down at a middle-aged man in a white shirt and tie trying to pull a small boy by his wrists inside an automobile. Cleo’s face wore an expression of unrelieved sadness.
“That’s the family we saw in the lobby. The kid’s probably throwing a temper tantrum,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
“He’s all right,” I said.
“I know that. I know that he’s all right.”
Later, in bed, I tried to pretend to myself that I wanted to give more than I wanted to receive. But I knew the selfishness that was always at work in my life, the heat and the repressed nocturnal longings and the violent memories that made me wake sweating in the false dawn, the dust and blood splatter that flew from L.Q. Navarro’s coat the night I shot him, all these things that burned inside me, that made me ache for the absolution of a woman’s thighs and breasts and the forgiveness of her mouth and the kneading pressure of her palms in the small of my back.
I buried my face in the smell of Cleo’s hair and held her tightly against me and felt my heart twist and a dam break in my loins and all the sound and light in my body enter her womb.
I propped myself up on my arms and looked down into her face. Her stomach and thighs were moist against mine, and I was smiling at her and expected her, at least perhaps, to open her eyes lazily and smile back, her mouth ready to be kissed again. But her eyes were tightly shut, her brow creased with three deep lines, as though I had just made love to a fantasy and she was looking up into a hot sky that was tormented by carrion birds.
And I knew what Doc had meant when he said that neither the weight of headstones nor our heartbreaking and vain attempts at recreating first love would ever disallow the hold of the dead upon the quick.
THE NEXT NIGHT Lamar Ellison was in a bar up the Blackfoot River, crashed on beer and reds, listening to the country band, talking to Sue Lynn, splitting a pitcher with Hollywood movie types who liked to float the Blackfoot and the Little Big Horn in safari hats and fly vests that showed off their suntans. Who knows, maybe he’d end up in the movies himself. Hey, look what happened to the Angels when they latched on to Leary and all these middle-class pukes who couldn’t wait to fry their heads with Osley purple.
There was Holly Girard over at the bar, her husband, too. Xavier was big shit with the writers’ community around here. Big shit in New York and Hollywood, too. European television crews interviewed him in lowlife bars, which Lamar couldn’t figure out, because why would a guy who owned a mansion above the river want everybody to see him on camera with drooling rummies?
Had Xavier heard about that rape beef? That doctor, the SEAL, was a writer or poet, too, wasn’t he? Man, that wasn’t good. Xavier had keys to the right doors and got an artistic buzz or something goofing with bikers and guys who’d been inside. Besides, the guy’s wife was a first-rate box of chocolates.
Lamar took the pitcher back up to the bar and stood next to Xavier, nodding at both him and his wife, blowing his cigarette smoke at an upward angle to show the right respect.
“Hey, my man Xavier,” Lamar said.
“Yeah, Lamar, what’s happenin’?” Xavier said. But his eyes were oblique, focused on the band and the dancers out on the floor, a swizzle stick deep in his jaw.
His wife was even worse, gazing out the door, chin in the air, like her shit should be bronzed and used for paperweights.
“I got some bad press. It was a bum beef, though. The sheriff knew it from the get-go. That’s why he cut me loose. I got no bad feelings against that doctor. The dude was in Force Recon. I went to Wal-Mart to buy his book but they didn’t have it,” Lamar said.
“I don’t read the papers a lot, so I’m not real tuned in on it. We’re about to boogie, Lamar,” Xavier said.
“How you doin’, Ms. Girard?” Lamar said, leaning forward so she could see his face.
“I’m quite well,” she said. But she didn’t turn her head toward him and her eyes were lowered, as though she did not want to see him even on the corner of her vision.
“I’m a big fan,” he said.
“Thank you. That’s very kind,” she replied.
He started to speak again, but she picked up her purse and walked past him to the rest room. She wore a silvery-blue dress that trembled like ice water on her rump.
“Man, she’s—” he said to Xavier.
“She’s what?” Xavier said, turning toward him.
“Real talented.” Lamar watched Xavier sip from his shot glass, then chase the whiskey with beer. The guy must have a liver the size of a football, he thought. How’s a drunk fuck like that end up with money and fame and educated broads falling all over him in bookstores?
He felt his irritability growing. “I’m starting to get a big chill here. I do something to you or your lady?” he said.
“No, I just have to go home and write.”
“You drink B-52’s before you write?…Look, I never went asking for no trouble. I’m not a bad guy. You want to see a badass? Check the cowboy in the corner. That’s Wyatt Dixon.”
“You need to let go of my arm, Lamar.”
“I’m paying out thirteen hundred bucks for a new bridge. I didn’t press charges against your friend. But I end up on the front page of the fucking newspaper…”
“I know what you mean,” Xavier said, peeling Lamar’s hand loose from his arm. “Those news guys don’t know character when they see it.”
Then both Xavier and his wife were out the door, and Lamar’s face felt full of needles, his ears humming with sound, as though he had been slapped.
HE TALKED awhile with Sue Lynn at the table, even though she had come to the bar with Wyatt. You had to show Wyatt you weren’t afraid of him. Not head on, nothing confrontational, just a little signal you didn’t rattle. Then he had gone outside and smoked some Mexican gage with two other bikers, swigging off a long-neck beer on top of their scooters, digging the sunset, watching the log trucks disappear up the grade in the dusk, trying to get rid of the vague sense of humiliation he’d felt when the Girards walked away from him like he was wrapped in stink.
But reefer and alcohol together always seemed to cook a terminal or two in his head. When he went back inside and sat down with Sue Lynn, he started talking. And talking. And talking. Without control, as though somebody had shot him up with a combo of crystal meth and Sodium Pentothal.
Then his brain kicked into gear again and he heard his own voice, in mid-sentence, as though waking from a dream, totally unaware of what he had just said.
Sue Lynn was a breed and looked as if she’d been poured out of two different paint buckets, but that didn’t explain the whacked-out stare she was giving him now.
“I say something wrong?” Lamar asked.
“Fuck you,” she replied.
“Who put a broom up your ass?”
Her eyes were red and glistening, as though she’d had a few hits of gage herself. She pushed back her chair and picked up her beer bottle and went out the door and let the screen slam behind her.
Now Wyatt was looking at him from the corner of the room. How many people in here had any idea what kind of guy was in their midst? They thought Wyatt was one of their own, with his flat-brim cowboy hat and triangular back and narrow waist and small, hard butt inside skintight jeans. But anybody who’d ever been on the yard would scope out a dude like Wyatt Dixon in five seconds.
Lamar winked and gave him a thumbs-up. But Wyatt just looked at him with those colorless, dead eyes, his mouth like a purple slit, as though he knew something about Lamar’s future that Lamar did not.
Well, eat shit and die, Lamar thought.
Why was everybody either in his face or on his case? A doctor, for Christ’s sake, knocks his bridge down his throat. An ATF prick gets his jollies describing how his ears are going to get lopped off. He tries to talk reason to this Texas lawyer and the lawyer points a gun at his crotch. A Hollywood movie star and her rumdum husband blow their noses on him in a public place and Sue Lynn tells him to get fucked.
Maybe it was time to think about losing Montana and heading back out to the Coast. He could almost see himself tooling down the PCH to Neptune’s Net on the Ventura County line, staying high on the sounds of surf and salt wind and waves crashing on rocks. Let the shitkickers frolic with the sheep.
He got on his Harley and bagged it down the road, leaning into the curves, the roar of his exhaust flattening against the cliffs on the roadside. The sun had sunk below the mountains, and the sky was ribbed with strips of purple cloud. A pickup truck came toward him out of the dusk and sucked past him in a rush of cold air, but through the window he recognized the driver, that damned Texas doctor he wished he’d never set eyes on.
Did the doctor recognize him? He didn’t need a return performance of that night in the bar at Lincoln. Lamar watched the truck disappear in his rearview mirror, then lifted his face into the wind again, secretly ashamed of the relief he felt.
He rounded another curve and saw a cottage supported by pilings on the edge of the river and a white Cherokee parked by the lilac bushes in front. It was the same Cherokee that Holly and Xavier Girard had left the saloon in. There were lights on behind the shades, and smoke rose from a barbecue pit on the deck above the water.
Maybe the evening still held promise after all.
Lamar pulled onto a gravel turnaround against the mountain, killed his engine, and walked back down the shoulder of the road to the Cherokee. He bent down over each tire and sliced off the valve stem with his pocketknife, then stepped back and viewed his handiwork.
It still needed a little something extra.
He found some rocks under a culvert, heavy and solid and hand-sized for throwing. He heaved one through the front window and two through the passenger windows, then reached inside with his knife and began slicing the leather seats.
That’s when he heard Xavier Girard running at him.
It was funny how a celebrity punk thought the real world was like the one he made up in his books. Lamar shifted his knife to his left hand and caught Xavier in the mouth with his right. Xavier went down in the gravel like a sack of grain.
Lamar shook his fingers.
“You must have ate your iron pills today. I think you busted my hand, Xavier,” he said.
Xavier didn’t answer. He was on his hands and knees now, his mouth dripping blood and spittle, his stomach hanging out of his belt like a balloon full of milk.
“You’re done, Xavier. Don’t get up. Oh well, I guess this means I don’t get a part in one of your wife’s movies,” Lamar said.
He pulled Xavier the rest of the way to his feet, then propped him against the side of the Cherokee and drove his fist into Xavier’s stomach, just below the sternum.
Xavier fell to his knees and vomited, then pressed his forehead against the gravel, gasping for breath, his back shaking.
“See you around. By the way, I read one of your books in the joint. I thought it sucked,” Lamar said, and started back toward his Harley.
But Xavier’s hand caught the calf of his leg, then he wrapped both arms around Lamar’s thigh.
“You want a little soft-shoe? ’Cause this time I’m gonna take out all your teeth,” Lamar said, and cocked back his boot.
Holly Girard seemed to float out of nowhere, holding a nickel-plated revolver with both hands, the tiny bones in her hands whitening behind the cylinder. Her dark blond tresses hung on her cheeks and her mouth was as red and soft-looking as a strawberry that he would have loved to burst against his teeth.
He stepped back from her, his palms raised upward. Three or four other people had walked out of the cottage behind her.
“It’s over as far as I’m concerned. Your old man shouldn’t have dissed me. You want to call the heat, I understand your point of view,” he said.
That ought to leave a fishhook or two in her head, he thought.
But when he looked at her eyes, then at Xavier and the other people from the cottage, he realized they never heard him, that the loathing and disgust they felt for him was so great they viewed him as they would a voiceless obscenity trapped under a glass bell.
He walked away, toward his motorcycle, his hobnailed boots crunching on the gravel. When he turned around they were gone, back inside the cottage, probably dialing 911.
So what? He was probably better off in the can than back on the street. He fired up his Harley and roared down the asphalt.
Home was a one-room block house made of railroad ties and an open-air tin shed where he sometimes repaired motorcycles. But it was on the Blackfoot, right upstream from a bar that was surrounded by pine trees, and he could cross the water on a cable-hung walk-bridge and shoot deer and bear up a canyon just above the old railroad bed. This spring he had killed a black bear and had hung it by its hind legs from an engine hoist to dress it out, then had gotten drunk and let the meat spoil. The bear still hung in the shed, coated with blowflies, its smell rising up against the tin roof of the shed as the day heated.
He sat on the edge of the bed in the darkness of his cabin, stripped to the waist, and smoked a joint and drank a quart bottle of beer, then lay back on the pillow and went to sleep. Tomorrow was another day. The same sun would rise on the jail as on the river. You just stayed on the hucklebuck, man. It didn’t matter where you did it.
In his dream he thought he heard the weight of the black bear swinging slightly from the engine hoist in the tin shed, then he awoke and realized someone was in the room with him.
A chain locked down across his throat, the links binding and cutting into his skin. Lamar pried at the chain with his fingers, but the dark figure who stood above him fitted a pipe over the boom handle, as a professional logger would, and squeezed down the boom, tightening it until saliva ran from both corners of Lamar’s mouth.
Lamar heard the rattle of liquid inside a tin container, then a splashing sound on the floor. The unmistakable sharpness of paint thinner climbed into his nostrils. A match flared in the figure’s hands and just briefly in the illumination Lamar saw a face that was both strange and familiar at the same time.
The fire spread under his bed in seconds. He thrashed his legs, twisting his head back and forth, and beat his fists against his own skull.
The fire swelled over him in a cone, and inside the flames he thought he heard a sound like blowflies and he saw himself, for just an instant, hanging upside down over a bright fissure in the earth he had long ago convinced himself did not exist.