WE HAD INDIAN SUMMER that year. The nights were crisp, the days warm, the maples heavy with gold and red leaves all over Missoula. College kids climbed every day to the big white cement “M” overlooking the university, and hang gliders turned in lazy circles on the warm updrafts rising from Hellgate Canyon. The evening news at our health club showed brief clips of burned-out American Humvees in the streets of Baghdad but never images of the wounded or the dead. Nor did the camera visit civilian hospitals. The war was there, not here, and Indian summer came to us every morning like a balmy wind laced with the smell of distant rain.
I wished for a dramatic denouement to the events of the last few months, a clap of divine hands that would reassure us of an ontological order wherein evil is punished and good rewarded, not unlike the playwright’s pen at work in the fifth act of an Elizabethan tragedy. But neither the death of Darrel McComb nor the revelations of the recorder he had hidden on his person could usurp the tranquillity of the system or dampen our desire to extend the beautiful days of fall into the coming of winter.
But Darrel’s worst detractors had to take their hats off to him. He had created a preface on the tape, explaining how he had anonymously called in a fire alarm on Brendan Merwood’s office, then had planted the recorder in the restroom when he entered the building with the firemen. The material on the tape caused the resignation of Fay Harback, who was discovered to have accepted large unsecured loans from a Mabus lending institution, and it brought about the arrest of Greta Lundstrum for the murder of Charles Ruggles. But Greta died in custody of coronary failure. And the security men who had tortured Darrel McComb to death and who had probably murdered Seth Masterson fled the area and to this date have not been found.
Romulus Finley and Brendan Merwood denied any knowledge of wrongdoing of any kind and were widely believed. If their careers were impaired in any fashion, I saw no sign of it. They played golf together on the links by old Fort Missoula, lifting the ball high above the fairways, their faces glowing with health and good fortune and the respect of their peers. Mortality and the judgment of the world seemed to hold no sway in their lives, but I sometimes wondered if Romulus Finley did not find his own room in hell when he had to look into his daughter’s eyes.
If there was a dramatic turn in the story, it was one that few people will ever know about. After the federal and state charges against Johnny American Horse fell apart, I saw Amber and Johnny coming out of the old city cemetery on the north end of town. The sky was an immaculate blue, the saddles in the mountains veined with snow, the maple leaves cascading like dry paper across the tombstones. I stopped my truck by the entrance and waved at Amber, who seemed lost in thought, a scarf tied tightly under her chin, a clutch of chrysanthemums in her hand.
“Oh, hi, Billy Bob,” she said, as though awakening from sleep. “We couldn’t find Darrel’s grave.”
“It’s in back. I’ll show y’all,” I said.
We walked up a knoll, though trees, into shade that was cold and smelled of damp pine needles and fresh piled dirt. I could see rain falling on a green hill by the river, and the sun was shining inside the rain.
“You think the dead can hear our voices?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I said.
“The sheriff told us Darrel was probably tortured for hours. At any point he could have given up our whereabouts,” she said.
“They would have killed him anyway, Amber,” I said.
Johnny took the flowers from Amber’s hand and spread them on Darrel’s grave. Then he drew himself to attention and saluted.
“I think he’d appreciate that,” I said.
When we came out of the cemetery, the sunshower on the hill by the river had turned itself into a rainbow. I saw Johnny’s eyes crinkle at the corners, and I wondered if, in his mind, the Everywhere Spirit had just hung the archer’s bow in the sky.
So maybe this story is actually about the presence of courage, self-sacrifice, and humility in people from whom we don’t expect those qualities. Not a great deal was changed externally by the events I’ve described here. Wyatt Dixon’s newspaper friends in Dallas published the story of Karsten Mabus’s connections to the sale of chemical and biological agents to Saddam Hussein in the 1980s, but no one seemed to care. In fact, Karsten Mabus is currently underwriting legislation in the U.S. Congress that will open up wilderness areas in this country for oil and gas exploration while, at the same time, his companies are receiving contracts for the rebuilding of Iraq’s infrastructure.
But as the old-time African-American hymn admonishes, I don’t study war anymore. I made my separate peace regarding my own excursion into violence at Mabus’s ranch, an event that left two men seriously wounded, consoling myself with the biblical account of Peter, who, after drawing blood with his sword in the Garden of Gethsemane, received only a mild rebuke from the Lord.
In fact, perhaps my greater sin was my presumption that violence, in this case the attempted assassination of Karsten Mabus, can change history for the better. As Wyatt Dixon suggested, Mabus cannot be gotten rid of by a bullet. Mabus is of our own manufacture, an extension of ourselves and the futile belief that the successful pursuit of wealth and power can transform avarice into virtue. His successors are legion and timeless. They need only to wait in the wings for their moment, then walk onstage to thunderous applause, their faces touched with an ethereal light.
I also knew that Mabus had a long memory and my story with him was probably not over.
But I refused to borrow tomorrow’s trouble and make it today’s concern. Our child would be born in spring, and each day Temple seemed happier and more lovely than the day before. During the fall she, Lucas, and I packed a straw hamper with supper and made a point of spending at least two afternoons a week fishing for German browns on the Blackfoot River, not far from the steel suspension bridge that led to Wyatt Dixon’s house.
The river was low, the coppery color of tarnished pennies, the scales of hellgrammites wrapped like spiderweb on the great round boulders that jutted out of the current. Right at sunset the browns would take an elk-hair caddis or blond wolf with such hunger and force they would slap water up on the bank. But German browns begin spawning not long after Labor Day, so we kept none of the fish we caught and instead replaced them in the river, holding their fat bellies cupped in our palms, while they rested, bursting with roe, their gills pulsing, waiting to reenter the current and disappear beneath the reflections of sky, trees, and human faces that can appear and dissolve more quickly than the blink of an eye.