"Black Cherry Blues" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke James Lee)

CHAPTER 7

I needed to go back east of the Divide and talk to more people about the disappearance of Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin. But I had gotten too late a start that day, and instead I drove up to Flathead Lake and spent two hours searching through property records in the county clerk's office. I was still convinced that there was some tie between Sally Dio, Dixie Lee, Harry Mapes, and Star Drilling Company. I didn't buy the story that Sally Dio kept Dixie Lee around to effect innocuous real estate deals or because he simply liked over-the-hill rockabilly musicians. I had known too many like him in New Orleans. They liked women but didn't consider them important; they liked power but would share it out of necessity; they were cruel or violent upon occasion but usually in a pragmatic way. However, they loved money. It was the ultimate measure of success in their lives, the only subject of interest in their conversations. They paid with cash in restaurants, not with credit cards, and their elaborate tipping was as much a part of their predictable grandiosity as their lavender Cadillacs and eight-hundred-dollar tropical suits.

But all I found in the courthouse with Dixie Lee's or Dio's name on them were deeds or leases to house lots, corner business property, and a couple of marinas, nothing that surprised me, nothing that suggested anything more than investments in local real estate.

I drove up the east shore of the lake, through the orchards of cherry trees, past the restaurant built out over the water and the blue lagoon with the rim of white beach and the pines growing thickly up the incline back toward the road, and finally to the entrance of Sally Dio's split-level redwood home built up on a cliff that overlooked the dazzling silk like sheen of the lake. I drove around the next curve, parked my truck off the shoulder, and walked back through a stand of pine trees that ended abruptly at the lip of a cliff that fell away to the lake's edge. Green, moss-covered rocks showed dully in the sunlight just below the water's surface.

Across the lagoon I could see Die's house and the cottage below where Clete and Darlene lived. I knelt on one knee among the pine needles and steadied my World War II Japanese field glasses against a tree trunk. An American flag popped in the breeze on Dio's veranda, his flower boxes were brilliant with pink and blue and crimson petunias, and a cream-colored Mercury and black Porsche with Nevada plates were parked in the gravel at the edge of his lawn. I wrote the tag numbers down in a notebook, buttoned it in my shirt pocket, then watched a big van with bubble side windows, followed by a Toyota jeep, drive out on the beach. The side door, which was painted with a tropical sunset, slid open and a group of swimmers jumped out on the sand and began inflating a huge yellow raft with a foot-operated air pump.

I refocused the glasses on their faces. It was Dio and what Clete called the Tahoe crowd. Dio wore an open shirt, flop sandals, and a luminescent purple bikini that fitted tightly against his loins and outlined his phallus. He was in a good mood, directing the outing of his entourage, pointing at a milk-white two-engine amphibian plane that came in low over the hills on the far side of the lake, unlocking his father's wheelchair from the mechanical platform that extended from the van's open door and lowered to the sand. Clete walked from the Toyota, wheeled Dio's father by a barbecue pit, lighted a bag of charcoal, and began forking a box of steaks onto the grill. He wore his crushed porkpie fishing hat, and I could see his nylon shoulder holster and revolver under his sweater.

The amphibian made one pass over the beach, gunned its engines and banked into the cloudless sky over my head, then made a wide turn and came in over the top of a cherry orchard and a sailboat dock, flattening out and touching its belly and wing pontoons down on the water in a spray of white foam and mist from the back draft of the propellers.

While Clete cooked and attended to the elder Dio, who sat sullen and wrapped in a shawl with a glass of red wine in his hand, the others took rides on the plane. I was amazed at the carelessness of the pilot and the faith of those who flew with him. They lifted off the water and into the wind and cleared the pines by no more than thirty feet, then climbed high into the sun, banked at a sharp angle, and came back between a cut in the hills, dipping down over beachfront houses in a roar of noise that made fishermen in outboards pull their anchors and turn in to shore.

I watched them for two hours. They smoked dope in the lee of the van, drank wine and canned beer out of a washtub filled with crushed ice, ate bleeding steaks and tossed salads off paper plates, swam out breathlessly into the lake and climbed laughing into their yellow raft, their bodies hard and prickled with cold. The girls were pretty and tan and good to look at. Everyone was happy, except maybe Clete and the elder Dio. The Tahoe crowd were the kind of people who knew that they would never die.

The sun had moved into the western sky, which was absolutely blue above the green hills, and the light must have glinted on my field glasses because I saw Sally Dio look up suddenly and squint at the pine trees in which I knelt. I stepped back into the shadows and refocused through the branches. Dio stood by Clete and his father and was pointing in my direction. Clete stopped cleaning up paper plates from a picnic table, glanced up briefly at the cliff, then resumed his work. But Sally Dio and his father looked as if they were staring at an angry dog that was running against its chain. The elder Dio's mouth was wide when he spoke to Clete again, and Clete flung a handful of picnic trash into a garbage can, walked down to the water's edge where the swimmers had left the raft, dragged it up on the sand, and began pulling out the air plugs. Then he loaded the hampers, the washtub of beer and wine coolers, and the elder Dio back into the van.

I could have gotten out of there, I suppose, without being seen. But sometimes self-respect requires that you float one down the middle, letter high, big as a balloon, and let the batter have his way. I walked through the trees back to the road. The air was cool in the shade and heavy with the smell of the pine needles on the ground. Bluebirds with yellow wings flew in and out of the smoky light at the tops of the trees. I walked up the shoulder of the road, got in my truck, put my field glasses inside their case, put the case inside the glove box, and started the engine just as Dio's van and Clete's jeep turned out of the entrance to the public beach and headed toward me.

I saw Sally Dio's face through the wide front window of the van, saw the recognition and anger grow in it as he looked back at me and took his foot off the accelerator. Clete was slowing behind him at the same time.

Dio stopped opposite my cab and stared at me.

"What the fuck you think you're doing, man?" he said.

Through the bubble side window of the van I could see people sitting in leather swivel chairs. Their faces gathered at the window as though they were looking out of a fishbowl.

"Wonderful day," I said.

"What the fuck you doing up in that woods?"

"What do you care? You're not shy. Come on, Dio. That air show was first-rate."

I saw his nostrils whiten around the edges.

"We told you the other day you don't come around," he said.

"You're not a cop. You seem to have confusion about that."

I turned off my engine and clicked my nails on the window jamb. He turned off his engine, too. It was silent on the road, except for the wind blowing through the pines. The western sun over the lake made his waxed black van almost glow with an aura.

"I heard you like to take off parts of people," I said.

"You heard what?"

"The Sal the Duck story. It's the kind of stuff they enjoy at the DEA. It brightens up a guy's file."

He opened the door and started to step out on the road. I saw his father lean forward from the back and try to hold his shoulder. The father's lips looked purple against his gray skin; his goiter worked in his throat and his eyes were intense and black when he spoke. But Sally Dio was not listening to his father's caution, and he slid off the seat and stepped out on the road.

I set my sunglasses on the dashboard and got out of the truck. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Clete standing by his jeep. Dio had put on a pair of Levi's over his bathing suit. His denim shirt was open, and his stomach was flat and ridged with muscle. I heard the van door slide open on the far side, and a sun-bleached boy and girl walked around the back and stared at me, but it was obvious they intended to remain spectators. Through the trees I could see the sun click on the deep-blue rippling sheen of the lake.

"You've got a serious problem," Sally Dio said.

"How's that?" I said, and I smiled.

"You hear an Italian name, you think you can piss on it. A guy's been up the road, you think he's anybody's fuck."

"You're not a convincing victim, Dio."

"So you keep coming around, provoking a guy, bothering his family, bothering his friends." He touched me lightly on the chest with three stiff fingers. There were small saliva bubbles in the corner of his mouth. His duck tailed hair was the color of burnt copper in the slanting light.

"It's time to back off, partner," I said, and smiled again.

"And it don't matter you been warned. You get in people's face, you got no respect for an old man, you got no respect for people's privacy. You're a jitter bird man." His three stiffened fingers tapped against my chest again, this time harder.

"You get off hanging around swinging dicks, 'cause you got nothing going on your own."

His face came closer to mine and he poked me in the chest again. The looped scar under his right eye looked like a flattened piece of string on his skin. I slipped my hands into the back pockets of my khakis, as a third-base coach might, and looked off at the sunlight winking through the pine trees.

"Let me run something by you, Sal," I said.

"Did you ever ask yourself why you have a certain kind of people hanging around you? Hired help, rummy musicians, beach boys with rut for brains. Do you think it's just an accident that everybody around you is a gum ball When's the last time somebody told you you were full of shit?"

I could hear his breathing.

"You got a death wish, man. You got something wrong with you," he said.

"Let's face it, Sal. I'm not the guy with the electronic gate on my driveway. You think the Fuller Brush man is going to whack you out?"

He wet his lips to speak again, then suddenly one side of his face tightened and he swung at my head. I ducked sideways and felt a ring graze across my ear and scalp. Then I hooked him, hard, between the mouth and the nose. His head snapped back, and his long hair collapsed over his ears. Then he came at me, swinging wildly with both fists, the way an enraged child would. Before I could hit him squarely again, he locked both arms around me, grunting, wheezing in my ear; I could smell his hair tonic and deodorant and the reefer smoke in his clothes. Then he released one of his arms, bent his knees, and swung at my phallus.

But his aim was not as good as his design. He hit me inside the thigh, and I brought my elbow into his nose, felt it break like a chicken bone, saw the shock and pain in his eyes just before I hit him again, this time in the mouth. He bounced off the van's side panel, and I hit him hard in the face again. He was trying to raise his hands in front of him, but it did him no good. I heard the back of his head bounce off the metal again, saw the genuine terror in his eyes, saw his blood whipped across the glass bubble in the panel, felt my fists hit him so hard that his face went out of round.

Then Clete was between us, his revolver drawn, one arm held out stiffly toward me, his eyes big and glaring.

"Back away, Dave! I'll shoot you in the foot! I swear to God I will!" he said.

On the edge of my vision I could see cars stopped on the road in each direction. Clete was breathing through his mouth, his eyes riveted on mine. Sally Dio had both of his hands pressed to his face. His fingers were red in the sunlight through the trees. In the distance I heard a police siren. I felt the heat go out of my chest the way a hot-eyed, hook-beaked raven would fly out of a cage.

"Sure," I said.

"I mean it, all the way across the road," he said.

I held up my palms.

"No problem," I said.

"Don't you want me to move my truck, though? We're blocking a lot of traffic."

I saw the sun-bleached boy and the girl walk Sally Dio around to the other side of the van. A sheriff's car was driving around the traffic jam on the edge of the road. Cletus put his revolver back in his nylon shoulder holster.

"You crazy sonofabitch," he said.

The holding cell in the county jail was white and small, and the barred door gave onto a small office area where two khaki-uniformed deputies did their paperwork. The cell contained nothing to sit or sleep on but a narrow wood bench that was bolted into the back wall, and no plumbing except a yellow-streaked drain in the center of the cement floor. I had already used the phone to call the babysitter in Missoula to tell her that I would probably not be home that night.

One of the deputies was a big Indian with a plug of chewing tobacco buttoned down tightly in his shirt pocket. He bent over a cuspidor by the side of his desk and spit in it. He had come into the office only a few minutes earlier.

"They already told you Dio's not pressing charges?" he asked.

"Yes."

"So it's just a disorderly conduct charge. Your bond's a hundred bucks."

"I don't have it."

"Write a check."

"I don't have one."

"You want to use the phone again?"

"I don't know anyone I can call."

"Look, guilty court's not for two days."

"There's nothing I can do about it, podna."

"The judge's already gone home or the sheriff could ask him to let you out on your own recognizance. We'll see what we can do tomorrow."

"I appreciate it."

"You came all the way up here from Louisiana to stomp Sally Dio's ass?"

"It sort of worked out that way."

"You sure picked on one bad motherfucker. I think you'd be better off if you'd blown out his light altogether."

For supper I ate a plate of watery lima beans and a cold Spam sandwich and drank a can of Coca-Cola. It was dark outside the window now, and the other deputy went home. I sat in the gloom on the wood bench and opened and closed my hands. They felt thick and stiff and sore on the knuckles. Finally the Indian looked at his watch.

"I left a message for the judge at his house. He didn't call back," he said.

"I got to take you upstairs."

"It's all right."

As he took the keys to the cell out of his desk drawer his phone rang. He nodded while he listened, then hung up.

"You got the right kind of lady friend," he said.

"What?"

"You're cut loose. Your bail's your fine, too. You ain't got to come back unless you want to plead not guilty."

He turned the key in the iron lock, and I walked down the wood-floored corridor toward the lighted entrance that gave onto the parking lot. She stood under the light outside, dressed in blue jeans and a maroon shirt with silver flowers stitched on it. Her black hair was shiny in the light, and she wore a deerskin bag on a string over her shoulder.

"I'll drive you back to your truck," she said.

"Where's Clete?"

"Up at Sal's."

"Does he know where you are?"

"I guess he does. I don't hide anything from him."

"Nothing?" I said.

She looked at me and didn't answer. We walked toward her jeep in the parking lot. The sheen on her hair was like the purple and black colors in a crow's wing. We got in and she started the engine.

"What's China pearl?" she asked.

"High-grade Oriental skag. Why?"

"You knocked out one of Sal's teeth. They gave him a shot of China pearl for the pain. You must have been trying to kill him."

"No."

"Oh? I saw his face. There're bloody towels all over his living room rug."

"He dealt it, Darlene. He's a violent man and one day somebody's going to take him out."

"He's a violent man? That's too much."

"Listen, you're into some kind of strange balancing act with these people. I don't know what it is, but I think it's crazy. Clete said he met you when you drove Dixie Lee all the way back to Flathead from a reservation beer joint. Why would you do that for Dixie Lee?"

"He's a human being, isn't he?"

"He's also barroom furniture that usually doesn't get hauled across the mountains by pretty Indian girls."

She drove up the east shore of the lake without answering. The trunks of the aspens and birch trees were silver in the moonlight, the rim of mountains around the lake black against the sky. I tried one more time.

"What does it take to make you understand you don't belong there?" I said.

"Where do I belong?"

"I don't know. Maybe with another guy." I swallowed when I said it.

The scars on the backs of her hands were thin and white in the glow of moon- and starlight through the window.

"Do you want to take a chance on living with me and my little girl?" I said.

She was silent a moment. Her mouth looked purple and soft when she turned her face toward me.

"I won't always be in this trouble. I've had worse times. They always passed," I said.

"How long will you want me to stay?"

"Until you want to leave."

Her hands opened and then tightened on the steering wheel.

"You're lonely now," she said.

"After we were together, maybe you'd feel different."

"You don't know that."

"I know the way people are when they're lonely. It's like the way you feel at night about somebody. Then in the daylight it's not the same."

"What would you lose by trying?"

She slowed the jeep on the gravel shoulder a few feet behind my parked pickup truck and cut the engine. It was dark in the heavy shadow of the pines. Out over the lake the sky was bursting with constellations.

"You're a nice man. One day you'll find the right woman," she said.

"That's not the way you felt this morning. Don't put me off, Darlene."

I put my arm around her shoulders and turned her face with my hand. Her eyes looked up quietly at me in the dark. I kissed her on the mouth. Her eyes were still open when I took my mouth away from hers. Then I kissed her again, and this time her mouth parted and I felt her lips become wet against mine and her fingers go into my hair. I kissed her eyes and the moles at the corner of her mouth, then I placed my hand on her breast and kissed her throat and tried to pull aside her shirt with my clumsy hand and kiss the tops of her breasts.

Then I felt her catch her breath, tear it out of the air, stiffen, push against me and turn her face out into the dark.

"No more," she said.

"What-"

"It was a mistake. It ends here, Dave."

"People's feelings don't work like that."

"We're from different worlds. You knew that this morning. I led you into it. It's my fault. But it's over."

"Are you going to tell me Clete's from your world?"

"It doesn't matter. It's not going anywhere. Maybe at another time"

"I'm just not going to listen to that stuff, Darlene."

"You have to accept what I tell you. I'm sorry about all of it. I'm sorry I'm hurting you. I'm sorry about Clete. But you go back home or you're going to be killed."

"Not by the likes of Sally Dee, I'm not."

I put my arm around her shoulders again and tried to brush back her hair with my hand.

"I'm sorry," she said, but this time calmly, with her eyes straight ahead. Then she got out of the jeep and stood in the dark with her arms folded and her face turned toward the lake. The water's surface was black and flecked with foam in the wind. I walked up next to her and put my fingers lightly on her neck.

"It's no good," she said softly.

I could not see her face in the shadows. I walked away from her toward my truck. The gravel crunched loudly under my feet, and the wind was cold through the pines.

The next morning was Friday. I was headed back to the other side of the Divide when my water pump went out at Bonner, on the Blackfoot River, ten miles east of Missoula. I had my truck towed to a garage in town and was told by the mechanic that he would not have the repairs done until Monday at noon. So I had to mark off two days that I could sorely afford to lose.

The air was cool and smelled of woodsmoke when I woke Monday morning, and the sun was bright on the lip of Hellgate Canyon and the valley was filled with blue shadows. I made cush-cush for Alafair and me, walked her to school in the spreading sunlight, then sat on the front porch in a long-sleeved flannel shirt and drank another cup of coffee and read the paper. A few minutes later a Landrover with a fly rod case in the gun rack pulled to a stop in front. Dan Nygurski got out, dressed in a pair of belt less jeans, an army sweater, and a floppy hat covered with trout flies.

"I've got a day off. Take a drive with me up the Blackfoot," he said.

"I have to pick up my truck in the shop later."

"I'll take you there. Come on. You got a fishing rod?"

His seamed, coarse face smiled at me. He looked like he could bench three hundred pounds or break a baseball bat across his knee. I invited him in and gave him a cup of coffee in the kitchen while I got my Fenwick rod out of the closet and tied on my tennis shoes.

"What have you got in the way of flies?" he asked.

"Nothing really, popping bugs."

"I've got what you need, brother. A number-fourteen renegade. It drives them crazy."

"What's this about?"

His mouth twitched, and the muscles in the side of his face and throat jumped.

"I thought I'd pick up some tips from you on how to handle Sally Dee," he said.

"I think you've got a first there. I don't believe anybody's ever cleaned Sal's clock before."

"How'd you hear about it?"

"The sheriff's office reports to us whenever Sal comes to their attention. A deputy told me you tried to use Sal's face to repaint the side of his van. I always knew he had some worthwhile potential."

"He's got skag and coke in that house."

"How do you know?"

"A friend told me."

"Purcel?"

"No."

"Ah, the Indian girl."

"What do you know about her?"

"Nothing. She's just some gal Purcel picked up. They come and go at Sally Dee's. What's your point about the coke and the skag?"

"Get a warrant and bust the place."

"When I put Sal away, it's going to be for the rest of his worthless life, not on a chickenshit possessions charge. He'd have one of those lamebrain beach boys doing his time, anyway."

"I spent some time up at the Flathead courthouse. Why's he buying and leasing up property around the lake?"

Nygurski set his cup in the saucer and looked out the window at the backyard. The grass was wet and green in the shade, and the sunlight was bright on the tops of the trees across the alley.

"He thinks casino gambling's going through the legislature," he said.

"The time's right for it. People are out of work, they've used up all their compo, agriculture's in the toilet. Casino gambling could turn Flathead Lake into another Tahoe. Sal would be in on the ground floor."

"It's that simple?"

"Yeah, more or less. I don't think it's going to happen, though. People here don't like outsiders, anyway. Particularly greasers and Californians."

"What did you come over here to tell me?"

"Don't worry about it. Come on, I've got an appointment with an eighteen-inch rainbow."

We drove up through the Blackfoot River canyon, which was still dark and cool with shadows and smelled of woodsmoke blowing up from the mill at Bonner. Then we broke out into meadowland and ranch country and sunshine again, turned off the highway and crossed the river on a planked log bridge, and began climbing on a dirt road through hills and lodgepole pine and scrub brush, where white-tailed deer sprang in a flick of the eye back into the dense cover of the woods. Then we came back into the canyon again, into the most beautiful stretch of river that I had ever seen. The rock cliffs were red and sheer and rose straight up three hundred feet. The crests were thick with ponderosa, and the water, blue and green, turned in deep pools where the current had eaten under the cliffs. The rocks along the shore were bone white and etched with dried insects, and out beyond the canyon's shadows, the great boulders in the middle of the river were steaming in the sun and flies were hatching out in a gray mist above the riffle.

I tied a renegade fly on the tippet of my nylon leader and followed Nygurski into the shallows. The water was so cold inside my tennis shoes and khakis that my bones felt as though they had been beaten with an ice mallet. I false-cast in a figure eight above my head, laid out the line upstream on the riffle, and watched the fly swirl through the eddies and around the boulders toward me. I picked it up, false-cast again, drying it in the air with a whistling sound inches from my ear, and dropped it just beyond a barkless, sun-bleached cottonwood that beavers had toppled into the stream. The riffle made a lip of dirty foam around the end of the log, and just as my leader swung around it and coursed across the top of a deep pool, I saw a rainbow rise from the bottom like an iridescent bubble released from the pebble-and-silt bed and snap my renegade down in a spray of silvery light.

I raised my rod high and stripped off-line with my left hand and let him run. He headed out into the current, into deep water, and my Fenwick arched and vibrated in my palm, drops of water glistening and trembling on the line. Then he broke the surface, and the sun struck the red and pink and green band on his side. I had to go deeper into the current with him, up to my chest now, and strip off my line to keep from breaking the tippet. I kept walking with him downstream while he pumped against the rod and tried to wrap the line around a submerged boulder, until I was back in the deep shade of the canyon, with the wind cold on my neck and the air heavy with the smell of ferns and wet stone.

Then I was around a bend, up into shallow water again, the gravel firm under my tennis shoes. It was all over for him. I worked him up into a small lagoon, watched him gin impotently over the clouded bottom with his dorsal fin out of the water; then I wet my hand and knelt in the shallows and picked him up under the stomach. He felt cold and thick in my hand, and his mouth and gills pumped hard for oxygen. I slipped the fly loose from the corner of his mouth and placed him back in the water. He hovered momentarily over the gravel, his tail moving for balance in the light current, before he dropped away over a ledge and was gone in the current.

While Nygurski fished farther upstream, I kicked together a pile of driftwood out in the sunlight, started a fire on the stones, and fixed a pot of cowboy coffee from his rucksack. It was warm in the sun. I sat on a dead cottonwood and drank the coffee black from one of his tin cups and watched him fish. There was a ranch farther upstream, and curious Angus wandered out of the unfenced pasture and nosed through the willows and clattered across the stones on the beach into the shallows. I saw Nygurski break his leader on a snag, then look back at me in frustration. I pointed to my watch.

He walked up the beach with his fly rod over his shoulder. His jeans were wet up to his thighs. He slipped his straw creel off his shoulder, slit open the stomachs of three rainbow, scooped out the guts and threw them back into the willows. Then he stooped by the edge of the stream and dug the blood and membrane out of the vertebrae with his thumbnail.

"I saw you turn that big one loose," he said.

"I don't keep them much anymore. I don't have a Montana license, anyway."

"You hunt?"

"I used to. I don't much anymore."

"You give it up in the army?"

"Something like that."

He poured himself a cup of coffee, took two wax-paper-wrapped pork chop sandwiches out of his rucksack and gave me one, then sat down on the log next to me. The veins in his thick neck stuck out like webs of cord when he chewed.

"What kind of gun do you have?" he said.

"An army.45 automatic."

"You have a permit for it?"

"In Louisiana I do. Not here."

"They're not real big on gun permits in Montana, but let's get you one, anyway."

"What are we talking about?"

"We have a tap on Sally Dio's telephone. He knows it."

"So?"

"He doesn't know that we have a tap on a pay phone down the shore from his house. The one that he uses for some of his longdistance calls."

I picked up a small, flat, gray stone and skipped it out on the water.

"He called a bar in Vegas," Nygurski said.

"He said to the guy who answered, Tell Charlie I've got a yard job for him up here." You know what that is?"

"No, that's a new one."

"I've heard a couple of Quentin graduates use it. It's when they do somebody out on the yard. The last time we heard Sal say something like that on a tap, a witness against him got a.22 magnum round behind the ear. But we don't know who Charlie is."

I tossed another small stone in a gentle arc out on the water. It made a circle like a trout rising, then the circle floated on down the riffle into white water.

"Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with you," he said.

"The Dios have lots of enemies."

I brushed the gravel off my palms and I didn't say anything for a while. The sun was hot now, and flies were hatching out of the cattails and rainbows popping at them in a shaded pool under the cliff.

"What do you think I ought to do?" I said finally.

"Maybe it's time to go back to New Iberia."

"You think he'd bring in a mechanic, risk his whole operation, because of pride?"

"Look, he's got a little clout in the mob because he's Frank Dio's son. But basically Sal's a loser. He's a lousy musician, he did time for stolen credit cards, his wife dumped him after he broke her nose, his friends are bought-and-paid-for rummies and coke heads Then you come along and remodel his face while everybody gets to watch. What do you think a guy like that is feeling for you right now?"

"It won't matter, then, if I go back to Louisiana or not."

"Maybe not."

I looked at my watch. Across the stream I saw a hawk drop suddenly into a meadow and hook a field mouse in its talons.

"Thanks for the fishing trip. I need to pick up my truck now," I said.

"I'm sorry to be the one to drop this on you."

"Don't worry about it."

"Why in God's name did you do it, Robicheaux?"

I didn't sleep that night. As we say in AA, the executive committee held a session in my head. I thought about sending Alafair back to Louisiana, to stay with my cousin or Batist and his wife, but then I would lose all control over her situation. I doubted that Harry Mapes would make a move against either of us as long as my trial was pending and it looked like I was going to take the fall for Dalton Vidrine's murder; but then again you can't second-guess a psychopath, and I believed that's what he was.

I still wasn't convinced by Dan Nygurski about Sally Dio's calling Vegas to bring in a contract killer. The mob, or at least its members I had known in New Orleans, did not operate like that. They whacked out witnesses, Colombian competitors, and each other, but they didn't hit ordinary people because of a personal grudge. Their own leadership didn't allow it; it brought down too much heat on their operation and compromised their hard-bought relationships with politicians, police officials, and judges. Sally Dee was a vicious punk, but his father was smart and cautious, a survivor of gang wars and Mafia power struggles. I just didn't believe they would be willing to blow it all over a broken tooth.

So the executive committee stayed in session until the false dawn and then adjourned with little resolved. As always when I was weak and drained and absolutely burnt-out with my own failed attempts at reasoning through a problem, I turned it over to my Higher Power; then I cooked sausage and eggs for our breakfast, walked Alafair to school, made arrangements for her to stay with the baby-sitter, put my.45 and an extra clip under the truck seat, and headed over the Divide for the Blackfeet Reservation.

My fan belt broke ten miles south of the reservation, and I hitched a ride with an Indian feed grower to a filling station at a four-corners four miles up the road. I bought a new fan belt, then started walking on the shoulder of the road back toward my truck. It was a mistake. Rain clouds drifted down over the low green hills to the east, shadowing the fields and sloughs and clumps of willows and cotton-woods; suddenly the sky burst open and a hard, driving rain stung my skin and drenched my clothes in minutes. I took cover against the rock face of a small hill that the road cut through, and watched the storm shower work its way across the land. Then a paint less and battered school bus, with adhesive tape plastered on its cracked windows, with bicycles, collapsed tents, shovels, and two canoes roped to its sides and roof, came high balling around the corner like a highway-borne ghost out of the 1960s.

When the driver stopped for me I could hear screws scouring into brake shoes, the twisted exhaust pipe hammering against the frame, the engine firing as if all the spark plug leads had been deliberately crossed. The driver threw open the folding door with a long lever, and I stepped inside of what could have been a time capsule. The seats had all been torn out and replaced with hammocks, bunks, sleeping bags, a butane stove, a bathtub, cardboard boxes bursting with clothes. A woman nursed a child at her breast; a white man with Indian braids sat on the floor, carving an animal out of a soap bar; another woman was changing an infant's diapers on the backseat; a bearded man in a pony tail slept facedown in a hammock, so that his body looked like a netted fish's suspended from the ceiling. I could smell sour milk, reefer, and burnt food.

The driver had dilated blue eyes and a wild red beard, and he wore leather wristbands and a fatigue jacket open on his bare chest, which was deeply tanned and scrolled with dark blue jailhouse tattoos. He told me to sit down in a wood chair that was located next to him at the head of the aisle. Then he slammed the door shut with the lever, crunched the transmission into gear, and we careened down the road in the blowing rain. I told him where I was going, and held on to a metal rail to keep from bouncing out of the chair.

"That's a bad place to stand, man," he said.

"There's fuckers come around that curve seventy miles an hour, crazy sonsobitches in log trucks think they own the fucking road. What one of them needs is somebody to wind up a brick on a string and put it through his window. You live around here?"

"No, I'm just a visitor."

"That's a weird accent. I thought maybe you was a Canuck."

"No, I'm from Louisiana."

His eyes were curious, and they moved over my face. The bus drifted toward the shoulder.

"Say, there's a cafe up on the right. I think I'll get off and get something to eat," I said.

"I said we'd take you to your truck. You'll get there, man. Don't worry about it."

The woman who was breast-feeding the child wiped his chin with her shirt, then put his mouth on the nipple again and looked impassively out the window. Her face was without makeup, her hair dull brown, long, and stuck together on the tips.

"You keep looking in the back of the bus. Something bothering you?" the driver said.

"Not at all."

"You think we're spikers or something?"

"What?"

"Spikers. You think we go around driving railroad spikes in trees?"

"No, I don't think that."

"Cause we don't, man. A tree is a living thing, and we don't wound living things. Does that make sense to you?"

"Sure."

"We live up on the reservation. We're a family. We lead a natural way of life. We don't get in nobody's face. All we ask is nobody fuck with us. That ain't a lot to ask, is it?"

I looked out the streaked windowpanes of the folding door. The countryside was green and wet and covered with a gray mist.

"Is it?" he said.

"No, it's not."

"Cause a lot of people won't let you alone. They're at war with the earth, man. That's their fucking problem. You don't do it their way, they try to kick a two-by-four up your ass."

The ride was becoming increasingly more uncomfortable. I figured it was three more miles to my truck.

"Do you know a girl named Darlene American Horse on the reservation?" I said.

"I don't know her."

"She's from there."

"That might be, man, but I don't know her. Check with my old lady." He nodded backward toward the woman with the child at her breast.

I asked her about Darlene. She wore large wire-rimmed glasses, and she looked at me quietly with no expression in her face.

"I don't know her," she said.

"You've lived there long?"

"A year."

"I see."

"It's a Blackfeet reservation," she said. Her speech had that flat quality of quasi-omniscience that you hear in women who have reached a certain gray plateau in their lives from which they know they'll never escape.

"Yes?" I said.

"They're all Blackfeet. The Sioux live over in South Dakota."

"I don't understand what you mean."

"American Horse is a Sioux name," she said.

"He fought with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse against the whites."

It's her married name, I thought.

"You know how they bought it, too?" the driver said.

"Dealing with the Man under a flag of truce. They went into the fort and got their asses shot. That's what happens when you trust those fuckers."

My God, why didn't I see it, I thought.

"Hey, you're looking a little gray," the driver said.

"What?"

"You want some food? We got extra," he said.

"No. Thank you. Did y'all know a guy by the name of Clayton Desmarteau?"

"You better believe it. Same outfit as me. First Cav."

"Did he have a sister?"

"What d'you mean 'did'?"

"You haven't seen him around in a while, have you?"

He thought for a moment.

"I guess not," he said.

"Do you know if he had a sister?"

"I don't know nothing about his family. He don't live on the reservation. He used to come on it to organize for AIM against them oil and gas companies. They're gonna mess up the East Front, try to build pipelines and refineries and all kinds of shit." ' "What color were his eyes?"

"His eyes?" He turned and grinned at me through his red beard. His teeth were missing in back.

"I look like I go around looking at guys' eyes?"

"Come on, were they turquoise?"

"What the fuck I know about a guy's eyes? What kind of stuff are you into, man?"

"He's a policeman," the woman with the child said.

"Is that for real?" the driver said.

"No."

"Then why you asking all these questions? You trying to give some shit to Clay ton's people?" The hair on his forearms grew like red metal wires on the edges of his leather wristbands.

"No."

"Cause the Indians don't need no more hassle. These are native people, man, I mean it was their place, and whites been taking a dump on them for two hundred years."

"I'll get off here," I said.

"You bothered by something I said?"

"Not in the least, partner. The rain's stopping now, and I need to walk. My truck's just over the rise."

"Cause we got no beef with nobody. We thought we were helping you out. You gotta watch out for a lot of people in this state. I ain't blowing gas, Jack. It's the times," he said.

I stood on the side of the road in the damp, sunlit air, a green pasture behind me, and watched the bus disappear over the rise. My truck was still a mile down the road.

The old woman was hoeing in a rocky vegetable patch behind her house. She wore laced boots, a man's oversized wool trousers, and a khaki shirt, and a shawl was wrapped around her head. In the distance the wet land sloped toward the Divide, where the mountains thrust up violently against the sky, their sheer cliffs now purple with shadow. Up high it had snowed, and the ponderosa was white on the crests and through the saddles. The old woman glanced sideways at me when I opened her wood gate and walked into the yard, then continued chopping weeds in the rows as though I were not there.

"Darlene American Horse is your daughter, isn't she?" I asked.

She didn't answer. Her white hair bunched out under her shawl, and the corners of her eyes were creased with concentration on her work.

"Mrs. Desmarteau, believe me, I'm a friend," I said.

"I want to find out what happened to your son. I want to help Darlene, if I can."

She thudded and raked the hoe in the dirt and stones and notched out weeds between the cabbages without ever touching a leaf.

"I think Darlene lives among some bad people. I want to get her away from them," I said.

She pulled back the door of an abandoned, dilapidated privy, put away the hoe and took out a shovel. In the back of the privy a calico cat was nursing her Utter on top of a pile of gunnysacks. Mrs. Desmarteau laid the shovel across a wheelbarrow loaded with manure and began pushing it toward the edge of the vegetable patch. I took the handles out of her hands and wheeled it across the dirt yard, then began spreading the manure at the end of each row. The clouds were purple on top of the mountains, and snow was blowing off the edges of the canyons. Behind me I heard the plastic sheets of insulation rattling on her windows.

"She's your daughter, isn't she?" I said again.

"Are you one of the FBI?" she said.

"No, I'm not. But I used to be a policeman. I'm not any longer. I'm just a man who's in some trouble."

For the first time her eyes looked directly at mine.

"If you know Darlene, why are you asking me if she's my daughter?" she said.

"Why are you here and asking that question? You don't make sense."

Then I realized that perhaps I had underestimated this elderly lady. And like most people who consider themselves educated, I had perhaps presumed that an elderly person like someone who is foreign-speaking or unschooled could not understand the complexities of my life and intellect.

"I didn't relate the name to yours," I said.

"But I should have. She wears her brother's First Cav army jacket, doesn't she? She also has turquoise eyes. Your family name is French-Canadian, not Indian. Darlene and Clayton's father was part white, wasn't he?"

"Why do you say she lives among bad people?"

"The man she stays with isn't bad, but the people he works for are. I believe she should come back home and not stay with these people on the lake."

"You've been there?"

"Yes."

"Are they criminals?"

"Some of them are."

Her hand slipped down over mine and took the shovel. Her palm was rough and edged with callus. She was motionless, the shovel propped against her wool trousers, her eyes fixed on the jagged outline of the mountains against the sky. The clouds on the high peaks looked full of snow.

"Are they the ones that killed my boy?" she said.

"Maybe they were involved in some way. I don't know."

"Why is she with them?"

"She thinks she can find out what happened to Clayton and his cousin. She worked in a bar. Where is it?"

"Five miles down the road. You passed it when you came here."

"Do you know a man named Dixie Lee Pugh?"

"No."

"Do you see Darlene?"

"She comes one day a week and brings groceries."

"Talk to her, Mrs. Desmarteau. She's a good girl. Between the two of us we'll get her back home."

I saw her breathe through her mouth. Her lips moved without sound.

"What?" I said.

"Clayton never did no harm to anybody. They said he carried a gun. If he did, they made him. They wouldn't let him alone. They were afraid of him because he was brave."

It was turning cold. I helped her finish spreading manure in her vegetable patch, then said good-bye and latched the wooden gate behind me. The sky was overcast and gray now. She looked small and alone with her hoe, in her dirt yard, in the wind that blew down off the backbone of the world.

I drove back down the dirt road and stopped at the place where Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin had put their car in the ditch. Did Mapes and Vidrine kidnap and drive them someplace, or did it all happen here? I asked myself. I jumped across the stream that bordered the far side of the road and walked up the slope into the lodgepole pine. The ground was thick with pine needles. Chipmunks played in the rocks, and red squirrels chased each other around the tree trunks. I walked about a quarter of a mile through the pines, then intersected a trace of a road that somebody had used at one time to dump garbage. The road dead-ended in a pile of rusted box springs, tin cans, mattresses, beer and wine bottles, and plastic soap containers. I went on another four hundred yards or so through the pines, then the trunks thinned and I came out on a tea-colored stream coursing over gray rocks. The stream cut along the edge of a low, rock-faced hill that rose abruptly into box elder, wild rosebushes, and thick scrub brush. I walked up and down the stream bank, crossed the sculpted tracks of deer, the delicate impressions of turkey and grouse in the wet sand, found the rotted, soft logs of an old cabin, tripped over the half-buried remains of a wood stove, and flushed a white-tailed buck that must have had ten points on his rack; but I saw nothing that was out of the ordinary or that could be helpful in discovering the fate of Clayton Desmarteau and his cousin.

Finally I came to a spring that flowed out of the hillside on the far bank of the stream. The spring dripped over rocks, and had eroded away the dirt and exposed the gnarled roots of small pines on the hillside. The water drained over a wide area of wet pine needles and black leaves, and the ground there was spongy and bursting with mushrooms and dark fern. I could smell the water, the coolness of the stone, the dank humus, the exposed tree roots that trailed like brown cobweb in the current. It smelled like the coulee on my property back in Louisiana. I wondered when I would be going back there, or if in fact I would be able to. Because I had decided that if I did not develop a better defense than the one I presently had, I was not going to deliver myself up for trial and a sure jolt in Angola pen.

I was tired. After hiking back to my truck, I drove up the road in the gray light between the wet fields, then I glanced in the side mirror at a black Willys Jeepster, a remake of the classic model manufactured right after World War II. Because the road was wet and there was no dust, I could see the driver's tall outline behind the steering wheel. Then he accelerated and closed on my rear bumper, as though he wanted to see my reflection in the side mirror or some detail of my pickup the dealer's name, a bumper sticker that read Mulate's, Breaux Bridge, Louisiana.

Up ahead was the wide, squat log tavern where Clayton Des marteau and his cousin had probably spent the last night of their lives, where Darlene had waited tables, and where she had probably met Dixie Lee Pugh while he was in a drunken stupor, saved him from getting his head kicked in, and driven him over the mountains to Sally Dio's on Flathead Lake. It was starting to mist, and a purple and orange neon war bonnet was lighted on the roof against the gray sky.

I pulled onto the gravel parking lot and waited to see what the driver in the Jeepster would do. He slowed abreast of me, his long hands on the top of the steering wheel, and stared intently out the passenger's window. His face, forehead, and neck were streaked with thin scabs, as though he had walked through a nest of rust-colored spiderweb.

I wanted him to stop, to open his door, to confront me with his injury and his anger. I wanted to see a weapon in his hand and feel that adrenaline surge, that violent sanction, that lights and clarifies the mind and resolves all the complexities.

But Harry Mapes was holding all the good cards. Harry Mapes had been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, and he knew that you don't change the terms of your situation when your Gatling guns are locked in on a solitary pajama-clad target in the middle of a glassy rice field.

He turned into the parking lot and parked by the front door, where three Indians in work clothes were drinking canned beer next to a truck. He lit a cigarette with a gold lighter before he got out of his Jeepster, then went inside without looking back at me.

By the time I got back to Missoula that night Alafair had already had her supper at the baby-sitter's, but I took her for a late snack at a pizza place called Red Pies Over Montana. She wore her soft denim jeans with the elastic waistband, patent leather shoes with white socks that were now gray with dust from the playground, and her yellow T-shirt printed with a smiling purple whale and the words "Baby Orca" on it. Her cheeks were spotted with red pizza sauce. Through the restaurant window I could see the stars over the mountains.

"Dave?" she said.

"What is it, little guy?"

"When we going back home?"

"Don't you like it here?"

"I want to see Tex. Maybe Batist needs us at the shop. He can't read."

"You don't have to read to sell worms and shiners."

"Nothing here is like it is at home."

"It has a lot of good things, though, doesn't it?"

"I miss Tripod. I miss Clarise. It's cold at night."

I brushed her shiny black hair with my hand.

"It won't be long. You'll see," I said.

But my assurance was an emotional lie. I didn't know when we could go back. I wasn't sure if I ever could. That night in the dark, with the door open between our bedrooms, I heard her saying her prayers by the side of the bed, then climbing in under the covers.

"Dave?"

"What?"

"Are people trying to hurt us? Is that why we had to move?"

I got up and walked barefoot into her room and sat on the edge of the bed. Her face looked round and tan in the moonlight through the window. Her blanket was pulled up to her chin.

"Don't think like that, Alf. Nobody wants to hurt guys like us. We're good guys," I said.

"Think of all the people who love you. Batist and Clarise and your friends and teachers at school. They all love you, Alfie. And I love you most of all."

I could see her wide-spaced teeth and the brightness of her eyes when she smiled up from the pillow.

But her thoughts were not far from my own. That night I dreamed of South Louisiana, of blue herons standing among flooded cypress trees, fields of sugarcane beaten with purple and gold light in the fall, the smell of smoldering hickory and pork dripping into the ash in our smokehouse, the way billows of fog rolled out of the swamp in the morning, so thick and white that sound a bass flopping, a bullfrog falling off a log into the water came to you inside a wet bubble, pelicans sailing out of the sun over the breakers out on the Gulf, the palm trees ragged and green and clacking in the salt breeze, and the crab and crawfish boils and fish fries that went on year-round, as though there were no end to a season and death had no sway in our lives, and finally the song that always broke my heart, " La Jolie Blonde," which in a moment made the year 1945. Our yard was abloom with hibiscus and blue and pink hydrangeas and the neighbors came on horseback to the fais-dodo under our oaks.

The next morning I got a call from Tess Regan, the third-grade teacher and assistant principal at Alafair's school. She said she had a one-hour break at eleven o'clock, and she asked if she could walk down to the house and talk with me.

"Is there something wrong?" I said.

"Maybe it's nothing. I'd rather talk to you about it at your house."

"Sure. Come on down."

A few minutes later she knocked on the screen door. She wore a pale green cotton dress, and her auburn hair was tied back with a green kerchief. I could see baby powder on her freckled shoulders.

"I hope I'm not bothering you," she said.

"No, not at all. I have some iced tea made. It's a beautiful day. Let's have some on the porch."

"All right," she said. The corners of her eyes wrinkled good-naturedly at the deference to her situation as a layperson in a Catholic elementary school.

I brought the tea out on the porch, and we sat on two old metal chairs. The light was bright on the lawn and the trees, and bumblebees hummed over the clover in the grass.

"A man called earlier," she said.

"He said he was a friend of yours from Louisiana. He wanted to know where you and Alafair lived."

"What was his name?"

"He wouldn't give it."

"Did you tell him?"

"No, of course not. We don't give out people's addresses. I told him to call information. He said he tried, but your number was unlisted."

"It isn't, but my address isn't in the phone book, and information usually won't give out addresses. Why did the call bother you?" I leaned slightly forward.

"He was rude. No, it was more than that. His voice was ugly."

"What else did he say?"

"He kept saying he was an old friend, that it was important he talk with you, that I should understand that."

"I see."

"Alafair said you used to be a police officer. Does this have something to do with that?"

"Maybe. Could you tell if it was long-distance?"

"It didn't sound like it."

I tried to think. Who knew that Alafair went to a parochial school in Missoula? Darlene, perhaps. Or maybe I said something to Clete. Or maybe the person called New Iberia and got something out of Batist or Clarise. Then he could have phoned every Catholic elementary school in town until he hit the right combination.

"What was the first thing this guy said?" I asked.

Her mouth was wet and red when it came away from her glass. Her green eyes looked thoughtfully out into the sunlight.

"He said, 'I'm calling for Dave Robicheaux,' " she said.

"I told him I didn't understand. Then he said it again, 'I'm calling for Dave.' So I said, 'You mean you're delivering a message for him?' "

"Then he knew he'd found the right school."

"What?"

"He's a slick guy."

"I'm sorry if I handled it wrong," she said.

"Don't worry about it. He's probably a bill collector. They follow me around the country." I smiled at her, but she didn't buy it.

She set her iced tea on the porch railing and sat with her knees close together and her hands folded in her lap. She dropped her eyes, then looked up at me again.

"I'm probably being intrusive, but you're in some trouble, aren't you?"

"Yes."

"Who is this man?"

"I'm not sure. If he calls again, though, I'd appreciate your letting me know."

"Is he a criminal?"

I looked at her face and eyes. I wondered how much of the truth she was able to take. I decided not to find out.

"Maybe," I said.

She pinched her fingers together in her lap.

"Mr. Robicheaux, if he's a threat to Alafair, we need to know that," she said.

"You have an obligation to tell us that, I think."

"This guy didn't have a Texas accent, did he?"

"No. He didn't have an accent."

"A couple of guys have a beef with me. Maybe he works for one of them. But their beef is with me. It's not going to affect anything at your school."

"I see," she said, and her eyes went away into the sunlight on the yard.

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean to sound sharp," I said.

"You weren't. I'm sorry you're having this trouble." She stood up to go.

"I think you should consider calling the police. Your daughter is a beautiful little girl."

"There's no law against a guy asking for somebody's address."

"You probably understand these things better than I, then. Thank you for the tea."

"Wait a minute. I appreciate your help. I really do. And Alafair thinks the world of you. But I could start explaining my situation to you now and we'd still be talking tomorrow morning. It's a mess, and it involves a bunch of bad people. I don't have any answers for it, either. Sometimes cops can't do you any good. That's why as I get older I believe more and more in prayer. At least I feel like I'm dealing with somebody who's got some real authority." I smiled again, and this time it took.

"I'll bet you handle it all right," she said, and her eyes crinkled. She squeezed my hand and walked down the steps onto the sidewalk, out of the porch's shadow, into the sunshine, her calves clicking with light in the bright air.

I went into the kitchen and fixed a bowl of Grape-Nuts for lunch. While I ate I stared out the window at the neighbor's orange cat climbing up the roof of the garage out by the alley. Overhead, two doves sat on the telephone wires. Who had been the man on the telephone? I thought. Sally Dio's mechanic out of Vegas? Or maybe somebody who worked with Harry Mapes. Why not? It would be a safe way for Mapes to keep me agitated and off-balance. He was a mailer of hypodermic needles and threats against a child. A telephone call to the school would be consistent with his past behavior. At least that's what a police department psychologist would say.

Except for the fact that I was the defendant in an upcoming murder trial and Mapes was the prosecution witness. The apparatus of the law was on his side; he was the friend of the court, the chain-whipped victim of an alcoholic, burnt-out cop. Mapes didn't need to shave the dice.

Which brought me back to my original speculation and Dan Nygurski's warning, one I truly did not want to confront. A faceless button man whose only name was Charlie.

Call the police, she had said. Suffering God, I thought, why is it that in problematic situations almost everyone resorts to axioms and societal remedies that in actuality nobody believes in? Tess Regan was a good girl, and obviously I was being too hard on her in my frustration, but ask yourself, have you ever known anyone whose marriage was saved by a marriage counselor, whose drinking was cured by a psychiatrist, whose son was kept out of reform school by a social worker? In a badass, beer-glass brawl, would you rather have an academic liberal covering your back or a hobnailed redneck?

I drove to Bob Ward's Sporting Goods, a mountaineering and tackle-and-gun store I had heard about even in Louisiana, and used my MasterCard to buy a.38 revolver, a box of rounds and a cutaway holster for it, a secondhand twelve-gauge shotgun, and a box of double-aught buckshot. Back home I carried the tool chest from my truck into the kitchen, slipped the top shelf out of the cupboard, and tacked the.38 holster to its bottom. I replaced the shelf, loaded five rounds into the revolver, set the hammer on the empty chamber, slipped the revolver into the holster, and snapped the leather strap across the base of the hammer.

Then I took a hacksaw from the tool chest, lay the shotgun on the back-porch step, placed my knee hard against the stock, and sawed through the ventilated rib sight and both barrels ten inches above the chambers. I broke open the breech, looked through the barrels at the clean, oily whorls of light, plopped two double-aughts in the chambers, snapped the breech shut, set the safety, and put the shotgun on the top shelf of the closet in the front hallway.

With the.45 in the bedroom, there would now be no place in the house where I would not have almost immediate access to a weapon. It wasn't a panacea, but it was all I had. I could have spent time regretting that I had bounced Sally Dio's head off his van in front of his friends, but if he was involved with Harry Mapes or Star Drilling Company, and I believed he was, it would have been only a matter of time before I had trouble with the Dio family, anyway.

I was still tired from yesterday's drive over the Divide. No, it went deeper than that. I was tired of pursuing a course that seemed to have no resolution, of walking about in what seemed to be a waking nightmare, of feeling that I deserved all this, that somehow I had asked for it, that it was inevitable that I ride in a wood cart like a condemned seventeenth-century criminal, creaking over the cobbled street through the mob toward the elevated platform where a hooded man waited with wheel and iron bar.

I put on my gym shorts, running shoes, and a cutoff sweatshirt, and ran four miles along the river. It was a cloudless day, the sky hard and blue, and the pines high up on the mountains seemed to tremble with light. In the south the Bitterroots were as sharp and etched against the sky as if they had been cut out with a razor blade. The spring runoff of melted snow was starting to abate in the river, and great round boulders that had been covered by the current only two days ago were now exposed and hot-looking in the sun, the skeletal remains of hellgrammites welded to their sides. I ran all the way to the university district, thumped across the river on an abandoned railroad bridge, and looked down below at a fisherman horsing a rainbow out of the current onto the gravel. The riverbank was lined with cottonwoods and willows, and the wind blew out of Hellgate Canyon and flattened the new leaves so that the trees looked like they had changed, in a flick of the eye, to a pale green against the brown rush of water.

When I turned into my block my body was running with sweat, and I could feel the sun's heat deep in my skin. I did fifty push-ups off the back steps, fifty stomach crunches, one hundred leg lifts, and twenty-five chin-ups on the iron stanchion that supported the clothesline, while my neighbor's orange cat watched me from the garage roof. Then I sat quietly in the grass, my forearms on my knees, breathing the sweet smell of the clover, my heartbeat as regular and strong and temporarily as confident as it had been twenty years before.

The moon was down that night, somewhere beyond the black outline of the Bitterroots, and dry lightning leapt whitely between the clouds over the mountains. I could smell electricity and impending rain through the screen door, and the trees along the street were dark and shaking in the wind. At nine o'clock the phone rang.

"Hello," I said.

"Can you come up here, Dave?" The line was heavy with static.

"Clete?"

"I need you up here, man. Real bad."

"What is it?"

"Darlene… Fuck, man. She's dead."