Two DAYS LATER I drove west of Missoula, past the U.S. Forest Service smoke-jumper school, then up a sharp grade between wooded mountains into a long green valley ringed by more mountains. I looked at the map Doc had drawn for me and drove across the Jocko River and followed a dirt road between two bald hills to the gated entrance of Cleo Lonnigan's property.
The morning was still cold. Smoke blew from the stone chimney of her house, and horses were standing in the sun by a barn that was wet on one side with melting frost.
I walked up on the porch and knocked on the door and removed my hat when she answered it.
"I wanted to apologize for speaking ineptly about your loss. Doc told me about it later," I said.
"That's why you drove all the way out here?" she asked.
"More or less."
There was no screen on the door. She stood perhaps a foot from me but had not asked me in, so that the space between us and her lack of hospitality were even more awkward.
"How's Doc?" she asked.
"The biker didn't file charges, so the cops let Doc slide. I guess getting your face bashed in is just part of an evening out here."
"Pacifists in Montana get about the same respect as vegetarians and gay rights advocates," she said. "You saved that biker's life," I said. She looked at me without replying, as though examining my words for manipulation or design.
I fitted on my Stetson and glanced around at the sunlight on her pasture and her horses drinking in a creek that was lined with aspens and cottonwoods.
"Can I take you for breakfast in town?" I asked.
"Doc says you were a Texas Ranger."
"Yeah, before I got hurt. I started off as a city cop in Houston."
She seemed to look past me, into the distance. "I have some coffee on the stove," she said.
Her house was built of lacquered pine, with big windows that looked out on the hills and cathedral ceilings and heavy plank furniture inside and stone fireplaces and pegs in the walls for hats and coats. In the kitchen she poured a cup of coffee for me in a white mug. Out back two llamas were grazing in a lot that was nubbed down to the dirt, and, farther on, up a hill that was still golden with winter grass, a whitetail doe with two fawns stood on the edge of a deep green stand of Douglas fir.
"Are you and Doc pretty tight?" I said, my face deliberately blank.
"Sometimes. In his own mind Doc's still married."
"I don't see Doc in your support group," I said.
"Why?"
"His wife died in an accident. I suspect most people in your group have lost relatives to criminal acts."
"Doc's wife worked for the utility company. They made her fly to Colorado in bad weather. He blames them for her death."
"I never heard him say that," I said.
"Sometimes if you confess your real thoughts, people will be afraid of you," she replied.
But I knew she was talking about herself now and not Doc. He had told me about her husband, a stockbroker from San Francisco who had taken early retirement and bought a ranch in the Jocko Valley six years ago. He and Cleo'd had a six-year-old son. Their lives should have been idyllic. Instead, there were rumors about infidelity and money-laundering back in San Francisco. The husband filed for divorce, accusing his wife of adultery, and won summer visitation rights with his son. He moved to Coeur d'Alene and each June came back to Montana and picked up his boy.
On a July Fourth weekend two years ago, the father's and the son's bodies had been found in the trunk of the father's automobile on the Clearwater National Forest. The automobile had been burned.
"Why are you looking at me like that?" she said.
"No reason."
"Doc told you everything that happened?"
"Yes."
"The people who did it were never caught. That's what's hardest to live with. The only consolation I have is that Isaac, that's my son, was shot before the car was burned. At least that's what the coroner said. But sometimes coroners lie to protect the family."
I picked up my hat off the back of a chair and turned it in my hands. I didn't want to look at her eyes.
"There's a rodeo this evening in Stevensville. I'd sure like to take you," I said.
The sun was setting beyond the Bitterroot Mountains when we walked up into the wood stands that overlooked the arena. The air was cool and smelled like hot dogs and desiccated manure and pitch-forked hay. The summer light had climbed high into the sky, and in the distance I could see the humped, purple shapes of the Sapphire Mountains and the shine of the Bitterroot River meandering through cotton-woods whose leaves were fluttering like thousands of green butterflies in the breeze.
"People say you come to Montana once and you never leave. Not unless something is wrong with you," Cleo said.
"It's special, all right," I said. But my attention had shifted away from the softness of the evening to a young woman down by the bucking chutes. She wore suede boots and bleached jeans with a concho belt outside the loops and a T-shirt and a straw cowboy hat that was coned up on the sides; she propped one boot on a white slat fence and watched three wranglers run a bull into the back of a chute.
"You recognize that gal down there?" I said.
"No," Cleo said.
"The biker girl from the bar in Lincoln. She tried to warn us about Doc. She thought he was going to get hurt."
"The one who got in the cashier's face?" Cleo said.
"She said the biker's whole name to me-Lamar Ellison. Like she wanted to make sure I'd remember it and tell somebody else."
"I'd like to forget those people," Cleo said.
"She made me for a cop. Two kinds of people can do that. Jailwise hard cases and other cops."
"Who cares what a person like that does?" she said.
I didn't pursue it.
The girl was joined at the fence by two men in scalped haircuts. They could have been bikers or paratroopers on furlough, but in all likelihood they were simply brain-dead misogynists who daily had to convince themselves of their gender.
A third man, with white hair and a trimmed white beard, joined them. He smoked a corncob pipe and stood very stiffly while he talked to the others, never quite looking at them, his gaze wandering around the arena and the stands, as though the environment around him was subject to his approval.
"I've seen that guy's picture," I said.
"That's Carl Hinkel. He's head of the militia movement here. They have a way of showing up in small towns that can't afford a police force," she said.
A rider climbed down on top of a bull in a bucking chute, working his gloved hand under the bull rope. The bull was rearing its head, blowing mucus, hooking its horns against wood, while the rider tied down his hand with what rodeo people call a suicide wrap. He straightened slightly, humped his shoulders, and clamped his legs tightly into the bull's ribs.
"Outside!" he hollered, his right hand in the air.
The gate to the chute flew open, and the bull exploded into the arena, a cowbell clanging on its neck, its body twisting, hooves slashing at the air, barely missing the two rodeo clowns who stood by the chute behind a rubber barrel.
The bull came down hard on its forequarters, jarring the rider's tailbone, then twisted in mid-stride and reared its head into the rider's face. The rider bounced once on the bull's back, one leg stabbing at the air for balance. Then he was over the side.
Except his gloved hand was caught under the bull rope, the arm bent backward, the rider's body flopping against the bull like a cloth doll's.
A brown balloon of dust rose from the arena as the bull spun in a circle, whipping the rider into the dirt, stomping him under its hooves, trying to hook the rider with one horn.
One of the clowns, a man wearing polka-dot pants, a striped cowboy shirt, firehouse suspenders, football cleats, and an orange fright wig and bowler hat, got in the bull's face, hitting its nose with his hat, actually stiff-arming it up the snout, directing its rage at himself while the other clown jerked loose the flank strap and dragged the rider free of the bull's hooves.
The crowd had risen to their feet, first in horror, then in relief and admiration as they witnessed the bravery of the clowns and the rescue of the rider.
For some reason the scene in the arena seemed to freeze, as in a photograph, but with a wrong detail, one that was out of sync, a flaw in what should have been a tribute to what is best in us. The bull was gone now, through a gate at the far end of the arena. The paramedics were working the rider onto a stretcher. He lifted his hand to the crowd and grinned weakly, his face streaked with dust and blood. The clown who had freed the rider's trapped hand from under the bull rope picked up the rider's hat and carried it over to his stretcher.
But the man who had behaved most bravely, the clown in the orange wig, never looked at the downed rider. Instead, he fitted the stub of a narrow cigar between his teeth and lighted it and looked up at the stands, smoking, his greasepaint grin like a fool's at a funeral.
He climbed over the slat fence by the bucking chutes, dropped to the ground, and accepted a can of soda from the militia leader, the white-bearded man named Carl Hinkel. He drank until the can was empty, his Adam's apple working steadily, and crunched the can in his palm and tossed it into a trash barrel. Then he studied the crowd again, and I would have sworn his eyes settled on me.
He walked to the bottom of the stairs that led to our seats, his cleats clicking on the concrete, and pointed into the stands, as though recognizing an old friend.
"Billy Bob?" Cleo said.
"Yes?"
"I think that man's trying to get our attention."
"I don't know any rodeo clowns."
She looked down at the program in her hand. When she glanced up again, her hand touched the top of my wrist.
"He's coming up here. Billy Bob, look at his eyes," she said, staring straight ahead.
They were recessed and wide-set, filled with an irreverent, invasive light.
He walked up the stairs two steps at a time, his legs lifting him effortlessly. He stopped at our row and pulled off his fright wig and held it on his heart.
"Why, howdy do, Mr. Holland. Bet you don't know who I am," he said.
"No, I don't," I said.
"Wyatt Dixon. Lately of Fort Davis, Texas. Before that, of Huntsville, Texas," he said, and extended his hand. The wind blew against his back, and I could smell a hot, dry odor like male sweat that has been ironed into a shirt.
I took his hand. It was as rough as a rooster's leg, scaled along the edges, the lines in his palm seamed with dirt.
"You know me from somewhere, Mr. Dixon?" I asked.
"Not me. My sister did, though. Katie Jo Winset was her married name. You call her to mind?"
"I sure do."
"She'd be flattered. Except she's in the graveyard."
"Same one her child's buried in? The one she smothered?" I asked.
He set one cleated foot on the concrete step above him and leaned one arm down on his knee, so that his face was next to Cleo's, his breath touching her skin.
"God bless this country. God bless this fine-looking woman here. Womanhood is the Lord's most special creation. It's an honor to be here to entertain y'all," he said.
"Thanks for dropping by, Mr. Dixon. Stay in touch," I said.
"Oh, I will. Yes-sirree-bobtail. You'll know when it's my ring, too."
"I'm looking forward to it," I said, and winked at him.
But he didn't ruffle. His lantern jaw seemed to be hooked forward, his eyes holding on mine. Then he jogged down the stairs, his arms cocked at his sides, his football cleats clattering on the concrete, his whipcord body jiggling.
He stopped at the bottom of the stands and counted out several dollar bills to an Indian hot-dog vendor and pointed up at us. The vendor, who was overweight and wore a large white box on a strap around his neck, began laboring up the stairs toward us.
"I can't believe I just listened to that conversation," Cleo said.
The vendor stopped at the end of the row and handed us two fat hog dogs wrapped in napkins, dripping with chili and melted cheese. Wyatt Dixon was watching us from the top of a bucking chute. I stood up so he could see me clearly and pointed to the hot dog in my left hand and made an "A-okay" sign of approval with my thumb and forefinger.
"I can't believe you just did that," Cleo said.
"Grin at the bad guys and never let them know what you're thinking. It drives them crazy," I said.
"What if they're already crazy?" she said.