Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

I drove back down the Blackfoot and into East Missoula, a community of trailers and truckstops and low-rent casinos, where the poor and unskilled watched the world they had taken for granted disappear around them. It Wasn't hard to find the junkyard where Sue Lynn lived. Cars that had been crushed and flattened by a compactor were stacked in layers on a knoll above the highway, and the windowless gray-primed stock car she drove, with orange numerals on the doors, was parked by an old brick cottage with a sign over the porch that read Salvage.

Sue Lynn and Lucas were on their hands and knees in the backyard, working on what I thought was a rock garden. Then I realized the design was far more intricate. They had laid out a circle of stones, with two intersecting lines inside it. One line of stones was painted red, the other black. In the middle of the cross was a willow tree.

Now Lucas and Sue Lynn were working each of the quadrants with trowels and sprinkling them down with a water can and planting purple and white and pink pansies into the mixture of mulch and black soil. The mongrel dog Lucas had saved from drowning in the Blackfoot River was nosing his snout into the dirt, his tail wagging, his hair matted down with the medicine Lucas had smeared on his mange.

I squatted on my haunches outside the circle of stones and took off my hat and put a peppermint stick in the corner of my mouth. "It looks real good," I said.

"It's an Indian prayer garden. The willow is the Tree of Life. One part of the cross is the red road. That's the good way in this world. The other one, the black road, that one's not so cool," Lucas said.

"Wyatt Dixon said you pulled a knife on him."

"He's full of shit. I took out a pocketknife to peel an apple and he made some kind of wise-ass remark about it," Lucas replied. "Why's he want to think I'd pull a knife?"

"So he can kill you, son." I felt my gaze break at the content of my own words. I also realized I'd never called Lucas son before.

"Maybe he'll get a surprise," Lucas said.

"Don't talk that way," I said.

"Should I leave?" Sue Lynn said.

"How are you, Sue Lynn?" I said.

She pressed the roots of a petunia into the damp soil and didn't answer. She wore cutoff jeans and a halter, and the tips of her hair were wet with perspiration and there were sun freckles on the tops of her breasts.

"Who owns this place?" I asked.

"My uncle. He did time in Marion," she replied.

"As joints go, that's real mainline."

"I told you once before I don't get to choose where I live."

"You ever read Black Elk Speaks by John Neihardt?" I asked.

"I never heard of it," she replied.

"You should. This prayer garden is in his book."

"My grandfather was a Crow holy man and you're an asshole, Mr. Holland," she said.

"Come on, Sue Lynn," Lucas said.

I got to my feet and put my hat back on. The hills across the river were velvet green and rose abruptly into the sky and ponderosa pine flowed from the crests down into the arroyos.

"My apologies to you, Ms. Big Medicine. Y'all have a fine day," I said, and walked back to my truck.

I saw Lucas running to catch me before I got out on the highway. I winked at him and gave him the thumbs-up sign.

That night Lucas played at the Milltown Bar. The tables and dance floor were filled, the crowd happy and drunk and raucous. When Lucas came to the microphone to sing his first song of the evening, his eyes were watering from the cigarette smoke and the heat of the stage lights that shone upward into his face. He clicked the floor switch with his boot and the banks of white lights died and cooled, and he clicked a second switch and four overhead flood lamps wrapped with tinted cellophane came on and bathed the stage with a soft reddish-blue glow.

He blotted the sweat out of his eyes and the room came into focus, then he looked down into a face that made him twitch inside.

"During your break I'd like to compare notes with you on Sue Lynn. She can really rise to the occasion if you can get down past that wore-out part," Wyatt Dixon said.

The next evening Doc and I attended a town meeting hosted by the Phillips-Carruthers Corporation at the Holiday Inn in Missoula. The crowd was a hostile one. Things had not been going well for Phillips-Carruthers. The previous day a famous female country singer had agreed to visit the mine site. Perhaps because of the fact she chain-smoked cigarettes and looked as if she had just been blown through the doors of a beer joint, the mine operators thought they had a sympathetic vehicle for their message. Also, like most greedy and obtuse people, they believed news media existed for no other purpose than to promote their business interests. Hence, they arranged for both p

rint and television journalists to be at the mine site when the singer was escorted from a company helicopter to the water processing shed that supposedly neutralized any contaminants that might leak into the ecosystem.