MY SON WAS Lucas Smothers. Illegitimate, raised by a tormented, uneducated foster father, Lucas was living testimony to the fact that goodness, love, decency, and musical talent could survive in an individual who had every reason to hate the world. He had my eyes and reddish-blond hair and six-foot height, but oddly I thought of him as my son rather than of myself as his father. When I had a moral question to resolve, I asked myself what Lucas would do in the same situation.
He was in his second year at the University of Montana and lived in an old, maple-lined neighborhood west of the campus. His small apartment looked like a recording studio more than the residence of a college student. Microphones, stereo systems, amplifiers for his electric guitars, stacks of CDs and old vinyl records, as well as his instruments-a banjo, mandolin, fiddle, stand-up bass, twelve-string mariachi guitar, and his acoustical HD-28 Martin-covered every available piece of space in the living room.
He answered the door barefoot, wearing no shirt, his stomach flat inside his Wranglers. Over his shoulder I saw a young woman go out the back door and clang loudly down the fire escape. “Who was that?” I asked.
“A friend who stayed over. She’s late for class,” he said.
“It’s two o’clock in the afternoon.”
“That’s what I said. She’s late,” he replied.
I nodded, as though his response made perfect sense. “Wyatt Dixon is out of prison,” I said.
“I read about it in the newspaper,” he said. He started picking up clothes from the floor, some of which included a woman’s undergarments.
“I ran him off our place last night. But he’ll be back. Watch yourself,” I said.
“He’s not interested in me.”
“People like Dixon hate goodness. They try to injure it whenever they can, Lucas.”
“I ain’t afraid. I know you sure as hell ain’t. So what’s the big deal?” He pressed a button on his stereo and the amplified voices of Bonnie Raitt and John Lee Hooker almost blew me out of the room.
BUT I COULDN’T get Wyatt Dixon off my mind that afternoon, or Johnny American Horse’s cavalier attitude about sharing information with me. I worked until late, my resentment growing. At 5:30 P.M. the courthouse square was purple with shadow, the trees pulsing with birds. I called Johnny at his house.
“You told Amber, ‘All those dudes are going down.’ How about some clarification on that?” I said.
“All power lies in the world of dreams. I have a dream about red ponies. It means I don’t have to worry about these guys who are after me,” he said.
“Then why were you carrying a gun?”
“Don’t represent me.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
I felt my old nemesis, anger, flare inside me like a lighted match. Don’t say anything, I heard a voice say.
“You got it, bud,” I said, and hung up the phone.
I wish it had all ended right there. But it didn’t.
THAT EVENING, Temple and I had supper at a Mexican restaurant in town. The streets were full of college kids, people riding bikes over the long bridge that spanned the Clark Fork, tourists visiting the art galleries that had replaced the bars and workingmen’s cafés on Front Street. A tall man in a hat and a western-cut suit walked past the restaurant window. His face was lean, his skin brown, his lavender shirt stitched with flowers. He could have been a cattleman out of the 1940s. But Seth Masterson was no cattleman.
“What are you staring at?” Temple said.
“That guy at the corner. He was a special agent in Phoenix.”
“You sure? He seemed to look right through you.”
“I’ll be right back,” I said.
I caught up with Masterson before he could cross the intersection. “Why, hey there, Billy Bob,” he said, as though my face had been hard to recognize in the failing light. “What are you doing in Missoula?”
“Chasing ambulances. You know how it is,” I replied. “How about you?”
“A little vacation,” he replied, his eyes twinkling.
“Right,” I said.
“You ought to come back and work for the G.”
“Got any openings?” I said.
“You know me. I stay out of administration. Hey, I don’t want to keep you. Call me if you’re in Arizona.”
“Sure,” I said.
He crossed the intersection, then went into the Fact and Fiction bookstore. My food was cold when I got back to the table.
“What’s the deal on your friend?” Temple said.
“Remember the story about the FBI agent who wrote a memo warning the head office terrorists were taking flight instruction in Phoenix? The memo that got ignored?”
“That’s the guy?”
“He was at Ruby Ridge and Waco, too. Seth gets around.”
“You want your food reheated?”
“Why not?” I said. But even after the waitress warmed up my plate, I couldn’t eat. I wasn’t sure why Seth was in Missoula, but there were two things I was certain of: Seth Masterson didn’t take prisoners and I didn’t want him as an adversary.
SATURDAY MORNING I received a call at home from a man who was probably the most effective but lowest-rent attorney in Missoula. If a human being could exude oil through his pores, it was Brendan Merwood. His politics were for sale, his advocacy almost always on the side of power and greed. What he was now telling me seemed to offend reason.
“You represent Michael Charles Ruggles and he wants to see me?” I said.
“He likes to be called Charlie.”
“Why would ‘Charlie’ have any interest in me?”
“Put it this way-he’s not your ordinary guy.”
“My wife got that impression when he called her a bitch and expressed his thoughts about her anatomy.”
“I’m just passing on the message. Do with it as you wish, my friend,” he said, and hung up.
I drove to St. Patrick’s Hospital in Missoula and rode the elevator up to Charlie Ruggles’s floor. A sheriff’s deputy stopped me at his door. “You’re supposed to be on an approved visitors list, Billy Bob,” he said.
“Better check with the man inside,” I said, and grinned.
The deputy went into the room and came back out. “Go on in,” he said.
Instead, I stayed outside momentarily and pulled the door closed so Charlie Ruggles could not hear our conversation. “Was Seth by here?” I asked.
“Who?” the deputy said.
“Seth Masterson. Tall guy, western clothes, nice-looking?”
“Oh yeah, you mean that Fed. He was here yesterday afternoon. What about him?”
“Nothing. We used to work together.”
I went inside the room and shut the door behind me. Charlie Ruggles watched me out of a face that seemed as dead and empty of emotion as pink rubber.
“You made remarks about my wife’s breasts and called her a bitch. But since you’re in an impaired condition, I’m not going to wrap that bedpan around your head. That said, would you like to tell me something?”
“I want one hundred grand. You’ll get everything your client needs. Tell the Indian what I said.”
I stood at the window and looked out at the treetops and the old brick apartment houses along the streets. “Why would anyone want to pay you a hundred grand?” I said, my back turned to Charlie Ruggles.
“Considering what’s on the table, that ain’t much to ask,” he replied.
The personality and mind-set of men and women like Charlie Ruggles never changed, I thought. They believe their own experience and knowledge of events are of indispensable value and importance to others. The fact that their own lives are marked by failure of every kind, that their rodent’s-eye view of the world is repellent to any normal person, is totally lost upon them. “Hey, did you hear me?” he asked.
“I don’t have one hundred grand. Neither does my client. If we did, we wouldn’t give it to you,” I replied.
“Your client knows the people he can get it from. They’ll pay him just to go away.”
“I don’t want to offend you, Ruggles, but are you retarded?”
His facial expression remained dead, but his eyes were imbued with a mindless, liquid malevolence that I had seen only in condemned sociopaths who no longer had anything to lose. “Step over here and I’ll whisper a secret in your ear. Come on, don’t be afraid. You’re safe with me. I just want to tell you about a couple of liberal lawyers who got in my face.”
He rubbed his tattoos with the balls of his fingers and waited for me to speak. I walked close to his bed.
“What do you think hell’s going to be like?” I asked.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
“Say what you said again.”
“I’ll give you something else to think about instead. You and your bud were armed with a semiautomatic and a cut-down double barrel, but an Indian with a knife and tomahawk cleaned your clock and didn’t get a scratch on him. If I were you, I’d stick to beating up old people and hookers.”
I could feel his eyes burrowing into my neck as I left the room.
ON THE WAY to my car I passed the sheriff’s detective, Darrel McComb. I had used the words “racist” and “thug” when talking about McComb to the district attorney, Fay Harback. Like most slurs, the words were simplistic and inadequate and probably revealed more about me than they did about McComb, namely, my inability to think clearly about men of his background.
The truth was he didn’t have a background. He came from the hinterland somewhere, perhaps Nebraska or Kansas, a green-gold place of wheat and cornfields and North European churches we do not associate with the Darrel McCombs of the world. He was big, with farm-boy hands, his head crew-cut, his face full of bone. He had been a crop duster, an M.P. in the Army, and later had worked as an investigator for CID.
But there were rumors about Darrel: He’d been part of the dirty war in Argentina and connected up with intelligence operations in Nicaragua and El Salvador; he’d run cocaine for the Contras into the ghettos of the West Coast; he was an honest-to-God war hero and Air America pilot who had been shot down twice in Laos. And, lastly, he was just a dumb misogynistic flatfoot with delusions of grandeur.
As a sheriff’s detective, he operated on the fine edges of restraint, never quite crossing lines but always leaving others with the impression of where he stood on race, university peace activists, and handling criminals.
Ask Darrel McComb a question about trout fishing while he was sitting in the barber’s chair, he’d talk the calendar off the wall. Ask him where he lived twenty years ago, Darrel McComb would only smile.
“I hear your man is on the street,” he said.
“Which man is that, Darrel?”
“Wyatt Dixon,” he said, feeding a stick of gum into his mouth, his eyes focused down the sidewalk.
“Fact is, he was out at my house. I shot at him a couple of times. Did he check in with you on that?”
McComb’s eyes came back on mine. “Your aim must not be too good. I just saw him eating at Stockman’s.”
“Nice seeing you, Darrel. You try to jump Johnny American Horse over the hurdles again, I’ll be seeing a lot more of you.”
I heard him laugh to himself as I walked away.
TEMPLE AND I and my son, Lucas, had moved to western Montana from Texas only two years before. But moving to Montana marked more than a geographic change in a person’s life. The mountains and rivers of the northern Rockies are the last of an unspoiled America. To live inside a stretch of country that still bears similarities to the way the earth looked before the Industrial Age humbles a person in a fashion that is hard to convey to outsiders. The summer light rises high into the sky and stays there until after 10 P.M.; the stones in a river quake with sound in the darkness, giving the lie to the notion that matter does not possess a soul; the sunset on the mountains becomes like electrified blood, so intense in its burning on the earth’s rim even an unbeliever is tempted to think of it as a metaphysical testimony to the passion of Christ.
But I did not need the grandeur of the Northwest to make me dwell upon spiritual presences. The friend I’d slain, L. Q. Navarro, was never far from my sight, regardless of where I happened to be. Sometimes he stood behind me while I groomed our horses in the barn, or perhaps he walked past a window in the starlight, still wearing the ash-gray Stetson, pin-striped suit, and boots and spurs he had died in.
L.Q. had an opinion on everything. Usually I didn’t listen to him. Most of the time I wished I had.
Don’t stick a burr in that McComb fellow’s shoe, he said to me that night as I was loading a wheelbarrow in the barn and hauling it out to our compost pile.
He started it, I replied.
That’s what we’d always tell ourselves before we scrambled somebody’s eggs.
I don’t need this, L.Q.
You should have parked one between Wyatt Dixon’s eyes and put a throw-down on him. No serial numbers, no prints but his own.
Would you give it a rest? I said.
He climbed up on the stall and sat on the top slat. He had a black mustache and his hair grew in black locks on the back of his neck; his shirt glowed as brightly as snow in moonlight. This American Horse business is starting to develop a federal odor, he said.
You were always a closet states’-righter, L.Q. You just never accepted it. Now shut up.
When I looked up, the stall was empty. From up the slope I could hear an owl screeching in the trees.
I dumped the wheelbarrow on the compost pile just as the phone rang in the house. The message machine didn’t click on and the phone was still ringing when I entered the kitchen. For some reason I thought it might be L.Q. It wasn’t.
“What do you want, Johnny?” I asked.
He was clearly drunk. In the background I could hear country music and loud voices. “Come have a drink with me and Amber,” he said.
“Don’t make me get you out of jail,” I replied.
I heard someone pull the phone from his hand. “Drag your butt down here, you wet blanket,” Amber’s voice said.
“Thanks for the call,” I said, and hung up.
LATER, IN THE EARLY HOURS of Sunday morning, a diminutive man, one for whom joy was an emotion he experienced only in stealing it from others, lay in the semidarkness of his hospital room, the maples outside alive with wind, the mountains to the east rounded softly like a woman’s breasts, the clouds veined with lightning.
The Demerol flowing out of the IV into his finger was the best dope he’d ever had. It made him neither high nor low but instead created a neutral space inside him that was like warm water in a stone pool or the fleeting sense of tranquillity he experienced after sexual intercourse. He paid little attention to the deputy who looked in on him occasionally or the nurses who came and went or a solitary figure in greens who gazed benignly at him out of the shadows, then reached down to puff up his pillow.
In fact, the Demerol made Charlie Ruggles feel so good about his situation he was sure the right people would once again show up in his life, as they always did, and set matters straight. It had started to rain, a warm, beautiful, steady rain that pattered on the tops of the maple trees. He could not remember a night that had been as perfect in its combination of colors and sensations. When he turned his head toward the figure in greens, the coolness of the pillow being placed across his face made him think of a woman’s kiss, perhaps from years ago, although in truth he did not recall any woman whose touch had been this cool and gentle.
Then a terrible weight crushed down on him, sealing his eyes, pressing his skin back from his teeth, as though he were trying to smile for the first time in his life.