“Got what wrong?”
“It wasn’t no man that was up in that cave,” he said.
“Want to spell that out?”
“He’s goat-footed and has a stink on him that could make a skunk hide. Think I’m taking you on a snipe hunt? Ask Albert Hollister if he ain’t seen presences in that arroyo behind his place. Indians and such.”
“A goat-footed creature was in that cave?”
“There’s a hearing specialist in Missoula I can recommend,” he replied.
I decided it was time to get a lot of distance between me and Wyatt Dixon.
I TRIED TO STAY mad at Clete for provoking a situation with Dixon, but I couldn’t. Clete was Clete. He didn’t like religious fanatics and believed most of them were self-deceived or mean-spirited and did great harm in the world. I didn’t believe Wyatt Dixon fell into either of those categories. He may have been psychotic, or he may have been an uneducated man who’d found a form of redemption among the only friends he’d ever had, blue-collar people to whom the struggle of Christ was their own story. Regardless, Dixon had said something I couldn’t get out of my mind. He had mentioned Indian presences behind Albert Hollister’s house.
The arroyo that led from Albert’s gun range up the hillside to the logging road had been the route used by Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce after they outflanked the United States Army up on Lolo Pass and tried to escape relocation to Oklahoma Territory. Hundreds of them had filed down the arroyo in the dark, carrying their children and everything they owned on their backs. They followed Lolo Creek down to the Bitterroot River and then went south to the Big Hole, where they thought they would be safe. When the
army attacked their village, the soldiers killed man, woman, and child, just as they had on the Washita and on the Marias and at Wounded Knee. It was genocide, no matter what others wanted to call it.
I asked Albert if he had ever seen anything unusual up the arroyo.
“What do you mean by ‘unusual’?” he said.
“Apparitions.”
“You saw something?”
“Not me. Wyatt Dixon may have,” I said.
“One time at sunset, I thought I saw dark-skinned people coming over the ridge and walking down the trail through the trees. I went outside, and nobody was there. Another time, when there was heavy fog, I could hear people talking up there. I walked about fifty yards up the hillside and heard a child crying. I also found the stone head of a tomahawk. I had been over that same spot many times, but I’d never seen any artifacts there.”
“What happened to Chief Joseph and his people?”
“The army put them all on cattle cars and shipped them to a mosquito-infested sinkhole in Oklahoma. What are you getting at?”
“I don’t want to believe that people like Wyatt Dixon have an accurate vision of either this world or the next.”
“Did you know the word ‘Kentucky’ comes from a Shawnee word for ‘bloody land’?”
“What’s the point?”
“When you kill large numbers of people in order to steal their land, they get pissed off, and their spirits have a way of hanging around,” he replied.
I wasn’t up to a barrage of Albert’s morbid polemics, so I went to find Clete. But he had gone off on his own and had not told anyone of his destination. I should have known a bad moon was on the rise.
THE SALOON WHERE they had arranged to meet was down by the railroad tracks, in a part of town where the brick shell of a three-story nineteenth-century brothel was still standing and cowboys and Indians and bindle stiffs and rounders and bounders and midnight ramblers still knocked back doubles and chased them with pitcher beer. Clete was drinking at the far end of the bar when she entered. The front door was open to allow in the cool of the evening, and the redness of the late sun backlit her hair and the creamy texture of her shoulders and the beige skirt that swirled around her knees. He raised his hand awkwardly to indicate where he was, then tipped his shot glass to his mouth as she approached him.
“Is this place okay?” he said.
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“It gets a little rough sometimes.”
“I like it here. They have a western band on Saturday nights,” she replied, sitting on a stool.
“What are you drinking?”
She looked at the shot glass and the small pitcher of draft beer in front of him. She touched the condensation on the pitcher with the ball of her index finger. “A glass of this will be fine,” she said.