Free Bitterroot by James Lee Burke Page B

had once before, probing for the secret thought, the personal agenda.
    “Eric’s gay. That’s why he speaks so generously about women,” she said.
    “My grandpa used to say outcasts and people of color are always a white person’s best measure,” I replied.
    “I think you and Doc really belong here,” she said.
     
     
    WE DROPPED her truck off at the clinic, then drove in the rain toward a cafe farther up the Jocko that sold buffalo burgers and huckleberry milkshakes. I pulled into a gas station and parked next to a row of sheltered pumps and stuck the gas hose into the tank. Then I saw a low-slung red car at the next gas island and an Indian girl with blond streaks in her hair standing by the back fender while the hose pumped gas into her tank.
    She saw me watching her and turned her back and lit a cigarette.
    “You got a suicide wish?” I said.
    “No, you do, dickhead. Get out of here,” she said.
    “You’re on the job?”
    Her face grew heated, her lips crimped tightly together. She ripped the gas nozzle out of the tank and clanked it back on the pump.
    Then a red-haired, lantern-jawed man in a yellow slicker and an Australian flop hat pushed open the glass door of the convenience store and walked toward us in the rain, an idiot’s grin on his mouth.
    “Bless your heart, I been thinking about you all day and you pull right in to the gas pump,” Wyatt Dixon said.
    “He was coming on to me, Wyatt,” the girl said.
    “Sue Lynn, Mr. Holland is a lawyer and a respecter of womanhood and a Texas gentleman. My sister, Katie Jo Winset, the one in the graveyard? She said he always removes his hat in the house and he don’t never walk around with spit cups, either,” Dixon said.
    “Did you follow me up to Montana?” I said.
    “I’m a rodeo man, sir. Calgary to Madison Square Garden to San Angelo. Can you step over here with me?”
    I started back toward my truck. But he situated himself in my path, the taut, grained skin of his face beaded with raindrops. His shirt was unbuttoned to the navel under his slicker, and I could smell the dampness on his body, like the odor of drainwater welling out of an iron grate. Behind him a stump fire was smoking in the mist.
    “At night, in a jailhouse, when you hear somebody scream? The kind of scream that’s different from any other you ever heard? You know Lamar or one like him has just speared a new fish. Jailing ain’t like it was in the old days, Mr. Holland. Folks ain’t raising criminals like they used to,” Dixon said.
    “Step out of my way, please.”
    “Two thousand dollars and that boy will be in a wood chipper. There won’t be no trace of him except a Polaroid picture for your doctor friend to burn in front of his daughter. Me and you has got regional commonalities, sir. For that reason I’m offering you a once-in-a-lifetime bargain.” He snapped his fingers at the air, the vacuity of his eyes filling with energy, his lips parted with expectation.
    I pinched the bridge of my nose and looked out into the grayness of the mountains and the fir and pine trees bending in the wind.
    “Let me see if I can phrase myself adequately, Wyatt,” I said. “Every so often a real piece of shit floats to the top of the bowl. I’m not talking about just ordinary white trash like your sister but somebody who should have been strapped down in Ole Sparky and had his grits scorched the first time he got a parking ticket. You following me?”
    “I’m fascinated, sir. Your elocution is like none I have ever heard, and I have stood at tent revivals throughout this great nation and have listened to the very best.”
    “You stay away from me, partner,” I said.
    After I had pulled the gas nozzle out of my tank and gotten back into the truck, he tapped on my glass, leaning close in to it, his face distorting in the raindrops that slid down it as he stared at Cleo. I wanted to simply drive away, but now I was blocked in by a car both in front and behind me. I rolled down