Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

On camera, a smiling company executive filled a drinking glass from a tap and offered it to the singer.

"It's as clear as spring water, ma'am. I'd give it to my grandchildren," he said.

"Thank you, sir. But I don't care to have nuclear-strength spinach growing out of my lungs," she replied, and smiled sweetly at him.

Probably due to the influence of a PR person with a brain, tonight the mine operators played over the heads of the audience and made use of their hostility. There was no shortage of fanatics and professional naysayers in the crowd, people who wore their eccentricity like a uniform and loved conflict and acrimony so they would not have to contemplate the paucity of significance in their own lives. The mine operators paraded working people in front of the microphone, both men and women who spoke sincerely about their dependence upon the mine for their homes and livelihoods. You could almost feel the mine executives praying under their breaths for a catcall from the audience.

But it didn't happen. The audience was respectful, the occasional dissenting moan in a listener hushed by those around him. Then Carl Hinkel, the militia leader from the Bitterroot Valley, rose from his chair in the third row and gave the mine operators what they needed, a dignified presentation that belied his agenda, that mixed patriotism and blue-collar attitudes with positive economic statistics and Montana traditions.

He wore a western-cut sports coat with pads on the elbows and a maroon shirt and a flowered tie and charcoal slacks. His beard was freshly clipped, his shoulders straight, his corncob pipe cupped in his palm. His Tidewater accent, empty of anger or malicious intent, was both foreign and intriguing to the audience. Their faces seemed to be reconsidering all the impressions they had previously formed about him.

"You're not going to spike this guy's cannon?" I said to Doc.

But Doc just looked at his feet.

"The Earth was put here for a purpose, to nurture and sustain us. The minerals we take from the ground are like the vegetables we grow on our farms. They're all gifts of the Lord," Hinkel said. "It seems to me a terrible arrogance to reject that gift. I don't mean to offend anyone here. I love this state. I think it's our charge to be good stewards of the land. I appreciate the opportunity you've given me to speak here tonight. God bless every one of you, and God bless these working folks who need their jobs."

When Hinkel sat down no one rose to rebut him. A long-haired kid in a fatigue jacket with a feather dangling from one earring stood up and made a rambling speech about Native Americans and wind power and the timber industry and missile silos east of the Divide. People's eyes crossed with boredom. Carl Hinkel now seemed like Clarence Darrow. "Say something, Doc."

"Fuck it. If they need the likes of me for a leader, they're not worth leading," he replied.

The sky was still bright when the meeting broke up and the audience drifted outside. The clouds were mauve-colored in the west and the rain blowing in the canyon at Alberton Gorge looked like spun glass against the light. I could smell the heavy, cold odor of the Clark Fork and the wetness of the boulders in the shadows along the banks and the hay that someone was mowing in a distant field. The riparian countryside, the purple haze on the mountains, the old-growth trees that were so tall they looked as if they lived in the sky, were probably as close to Eden as modern man ever got, I thought. But this wonderful part of the world was also one that Carl Hinkel and his friends, if given the opportunity, would turn into a separate country surrounded by razor wire and guard towers.

People who should have known better had stopped to chat with him. He was obviously a strong man physically, and he demonstrated his strength by picking up a plump little girl of ten or eleven and holding her out at arm's length.

"Excuse me, Mr. Hinkel," I said.

"Yes?" he said, turning toward me, his eyebrows raised.

"I keep having trouble with Wyatt Dixon. I don't think he does anything without your permission. The next time he bothers my son, I'm going to be out to your place and kick a nail-studded two-by-four up your sorry white ass."

"I'm afraid I don't know who you are," he said. "Oh, really?"

"I'm sixty years old, sir. It seems to me you embarrass your son and degrade yourself. But if you wish to physically attack me, do it and be done," he said.

The conversation died around us and every person on the motel's grass swale and tree-shaded driveway was now staring at me. Carl Hinkel waited, then put his pipe into his mouth and drew a thumbnail across the top of a match and lit the tobacco in his pipe bowl and gazed into the distance.

My face was red with shame. I turned and walked away, unable to believe my own vanity and stupidity. I heard Doc at my elbow.

"You're going about it the wrong way, bud. These guys don't fight fair," he said. "Tell me about it."

"My father always said God loves fools. Join the club. Don't worry. They're all going down," Doc said. He cupped his hand around the back of my neck like a baseball catcher mothering a pitcher who had just been shelled off the mound.

I turned and looked into his face.

"All going down?" I said.

I GUESS I had misjudged Doc's potential. Or at least Wyatt Dixon had.

The next night he was at home in the small log house Carl Hinkel had given him to use on the back of Hinkel's property. The moon was up and from his window he could see the lines of cottonwoods along the Bitterroot River and the monolithic shapes of the mountains against the sky and the thick stands of timber that grew into the canyons. A star shower burst above the valley and Wyatt Dixon wondered if the tracings of light across the darkness of the heavens were a sign, perhaps an indicator that an enormous historical change was at hand for him and his kind.

Or perhaps he thought nothing at all.

The night was cold, but neither cold nor heat had ever had an appreciable effect on him. He wore only a nylon vest over his skin when he walked down to the river with a cane pole and a can of worms and bobber-fished in an eddy behind a beaver dam. Two nights earlier he had spread the surface of the water with cornmeal, and now, in less than five minutes, he hooked what was at least a twenty-five-inch bull trout. He let the trout swallow the treble hook, down the throat and into the belly, so there would be no chance of its slipping off, then he horsed it onto the bank and picked it up by the tail and swung it like a sock full of wet sand and bashed its brains out on a rock.

As he walked back to his house he saw car lights through a stand of lodgepole pine on the neighbor's property, but the lights disappeared and he gave them no more thought. He slit the belly of his fish under an outside faucet and raked out the guts and threw them to one of Carl's cats, then he scrubbed his hands clean under the faucet and threaded a stick through the trout's gills and mouth and went inside his house.

Just inside the doorway a piece of bronze wire glistened once on the edge of his vision, then looped over his head and tightened around his neck, squeezing tendon and artery, shutting off air to his lungs and blood to his brain.