"Bitterroot" - читать интересную книгу автора (Burke James Lee)

Chapter 2

Doc's deceased WIFE had come from a ranching family in the Bitterroot Valley of western Montana. When Doc first met her on a fishing vacation nearly twenty years ago, I think he fell in love with her state almost as much as he did with her. After her death and burial on her family's ranch, he returned to Montana again and again, spending the entire summer and holiday season there, floating the Bitterroot River or cross-country skiing and climbing in the Bitterroot Mountains with pitons and ice ax. I suspected in Doc's mind his wife was still with him when he glided down the old sunlit ski trails that crisscrossed the timber above her burial place. Finally he bought a log house on the Blackfoot River. He said it was only a vacation home, but I believed Doc was slipping away from us. Perhaps true peace might eventually come into his life, I told myself.

Then, just last June, he invited me for an indefinite visit. I turned my law office over to a partner for three months and headed north with creel and fly rod in the foolish hope that somehow my own ghosts did not cross state lines.

Supposedly the word " Missoula " is from the Salish Indian language and means "the meeting of the rivers." The area is so named because it is there that both the Bitterroot and Blackfoot rivers flow into the Clark Fork of the Columbia.

The wooded hills above the Blackfoot River where Doc had bought his home were still dark at 7 A.M., the moon like a sliver of crusted ice above a steep-sided rock canyon that rose to a plateau covered with ponderosa. The river seemed to glow with a black, metallic light, and steam boiled out of the falls in the channels and off the boulders that were exposed in the current.

I picked up my fly rod and net and canvas creel from the porch of Doc's house and walked down the path toward the riverbank. The air smelled of the water's coldness and the humus back in the darkness of the woods and the deer and elk dung that had dried on the pebbled banks of the river. I watched Doc Voss squat on his haunches in front of a driftwood fire and stir the strips of ham in a skillet with a fork, squinting his eyes against the smoke, his upper body warmed only by a fly vest, his shoulders braided with sinew. Then the sun broke through the tree trunks on the ridge and lighted the meadows and woods and cliffs around us with a pinkness that made us involuntarily look up into the vastness of the Montana sky, as though the stars had been unfairly stolen from us.

Doc handed me a tin plate filled with eggs and ham and chunks of bread he had cut on a rock and browned in the ham's fat. He sat down beside me on a grassy, soft spot and leaned back against a boulder and drank from a collapsible stainless steel coffee cup and watched his daughter standing thigh-deep in the river, without waders, indifferent to the cold, fishing in a pool that swirled behind a rotted cottonwood. He took a tiny salt and pepper shaker out of his rucksack, then removed a holstered.44 Magnum revolver from the sack and set it on top of some ferns, the wide belt and heavy, square brass buckle and leather-snugged cartridges wrapped across the cherrywood grips.

"Fine-looking gun," I said.

"Thank you," he replied.

"Fixing to shoot the rainbow that won't jump in your creel?" I said.

"Cougars come down through the trees at night. They get into the cat bowls and such."

"It's not night," I said.

He grinned at nothing and looked in his daughter's direction. She was a junior in high school, her blond hair cropped short on the back of her neck, her denim shirt tight across her waist when she lifted her rod above her head and pulled her line dripping from under the river's surface and false-cast the dry fly on the tippet in a figure eight.

Doc kept touching his jawbone with his thumb, as though he had an impacted wisdom tooth.

"What are you studying on?" I asked.

"Me?"

"No. The rock you're leaning against."

"The country's going to hell," he said.

"People have been saying that for two hundred years."

"You've been here eleven hours and you've got it all figured out. I wish I had them kind of smarts," he replied.

He left his food uneaten and walked upstream with his fly rod, his long, ash-blond hair blowing in the wind, his shoulders stooped like an ancient hunter's.

Fifteen minutes later I followed his daughter up to the log house that was planted with roses and hung with wind chimes. She stood at the sink, ripping the intestines from a rainbow trout, the water from the tap splashing on her wrists. Her eyebrows were drawn together as though she were trying to see through a skein of tangled thoughts just in front of her face.

"What's the problem with your old man?" I asked.

"Midlife crisis," she answered, feigning a smile, suddenly knowledgeable about the psychological metabolism of people thirty years her senior.

"Why's he carrying a revolver?"

"Somebody shot into our house down in Deaf Smith yesterday. It was probably a drunk hunter. Dad thinks it's the militia or these people dumping cyanide into the Blackfoot. He treats me like a child," she said, her face growing darker with her own rhetoric.

"Excuse me?" I said, trying to follow the progression of her logic.

"I'm almost seventeen. He doesn't get it."

"What militia?"

"They're down in the Bitterroot Valley. A bunch of crazy people who think it's patriotic not to pay their bills. Dad writes letters to the newspaper about them. It's stupid."

"Who's putting cyanide in the water?"

"Ask him. Or his friends who think they're environmentalists because they drink in bars that have logs in the walls."

"Your old man's a good guy. Why not give him a break?"

She scraped the dark and clotted blood away from the trout's vertebrae with her thumbnail, then washed her hands under the tap and dried them on her rump.

"The only person he ever listened to was my mom. I'm not my mom," she said. She walked out the back door with a bag of fish guts for the cats.

I found Doc beyond a wooded bend in the river. He was false-casting his line on a white, pebbled stretch of beach, then dropping his fly as softly as a moth in the middle of an undulating riffle. The light and water on his nylon tippet looked like liquid glass as it cut through the air over his head.

"What's going on with you guys?" I said.

"With Maisey? Just growing pains."

"No, the gun. These militia guys or whatever," I said.

"Wars don't get fought in New York or Paris. They get fought in places nobody cares about. Welcome to the war," he said.

"Maybe I picked a bad time to visit," I said.

"No, you didn't. See, a German brown is feeding right under that overhang. He's thick across as my hand. If I was you, I'd float an elk-hair caddis by him," Doc said.

I hesitated for a moment, then waded into the stream. The coldness of the water surged like melted ice over my tennis shoes and khakis. I pulled my fly line out of the reel with my left hand and felt it feed through the eyelets on the rod as I false-cast with my right, the brightly honed hook of the caddis fly whipping past my ear.