Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

When she awoke, her eyes were bound and she was being carried under the thighs and back by someone with arms that were as hard as oak. Her head was pressed against his chest and she could hear the whirrings of his heart and feel the rise and fall of his lungs as he carried her through trees and across ground that was littered with leaves and dead twigs.

She tried to raise her hands, then realized they were taped at the wrists and the tape was wound around her body. The man carrying her knelt to the ground and placed her on pine needles and leaves that were cold against her skin where her shirt had pulled out of her jeans. She could hear a river down below, roaring through a canyon or perhaps over rocks, and she could smell the coldness of the water and the clean odor of new snow in the wind. Then she heard a shovel bite into the earth and she swallowed with a type of fear she had never experienced before.

"Why are you doing this?" she asked. But her words were lost in the sounds of the river. She heard a second shovel chopping at the ground, the metal clanging against rocks, scraping back soil into a pile, the way someone might use an Army entrenching tool, and she knew two people were now digging her grave.

She tried to sit up, but a large hand restrained her, pressing her back onto the ground. The man lowered his face to hers, and she felt his breath on her skin and she knew his eyes were examining her mouth and nose and hair, like a curious animal investigating prey he had stumbled upon in a den. One finger traced a mole by the corner of her mouth, then his knuckle moved up and down her jawline, and she was convinced she had never been touched by a more brutal hand. It was sheathed in callus, as though the tissue had been rubbed with brick dust or burned and hardened with chemicals. The pads of the fingers had the texture of emery paper.

His thumb brushed her lips and his nail played with her teeth, then he pried them apart and inserted a rubber hose in her mouth.

"No, don't be trying to spit it out, now. That ain't smart. No-sirree-bob," the man's voice said.

But she did it anyway, spitting the hose out as well as the unwashed taste of his hand.

"You motherfuckers," she said, turning her head, trying to sight her words on his face.

"A profane woman brings discredit on her gender. Please do not use words of that nature to me again. I declare, this world has done become a toilet," the man said.

He fitted his hands under her arms and dragged her into a depressed, rocky place that caused her heels to drop abruptly into the hardness of the ground. Then the two diggers began burying her alive, flinging spadeful after spadeful of dirt onto her body.

She was amazed at how little time it took for her feet, then her calves and thighs and stomach and chest and arms to be weighted and encased with dirt and rock that seemed to hold her as solidly as cement. One of the diggers stopped work and dropped his shovel on the ground and knelt down and removed a strand of hair from the edge of her mouth.

Then he touched the hose against her teeth, and this time she opened her mouth and took it.

The diggers went back to work, and she felt the dirt strike her cheeks like dry rain and the earth close on her face. The noise of the river and the voices of the diggers disappeared, as though effaced from the surface of the world, and the only sound she could hear was her own breathing through the hose and the thump of large stones being dropped into place on top of her.

She tried to think of the farm where she had lived as a little girl down by Matagorda Bay. The pasture was carpeted with bluebonnets in the spring, and a family of owls lived in a desiccated red barn behind the house, and at sunrise she would look through the window and see the owls gliding out of the woods to a hole in the barn roof, where they squeezed inside and disappeared just as the pinkness of the morning broke across the countryside. She came to associate the owls' flight into darkness with the fine beginning of a new day.

She thought of Gulf storms and the way the rain marched across the bay and danced on the watermelons in her father's fields. She saw the windmill ginning in the breeze and water pumping into the horse tank and the hard blueness of the sky and the moss straightening in the live oak that shaded one side of their house. She saw a sky writer spelling out the name of a soda pop, banking and climbing straight up into the dome of heaven itself, laying out white smoke one thick letter at a time. Then the letters lost their rigidity of line and broke into curds, like buttermilk, and her father told her that was the wind blowing across the top of the sky, and she wondered how wind could blow in a place where no trees grew.

She thought of all the earth's gifts that lived in the air, the smell of sea salt on a hot day, the way clouds transformed themselves when you lay in the grass and looked up into the heavens, the ozone that lightning gave off, the clatter of palm fronds, the red and gold leaves that cascaded out of the trees in the fall.

In her mind's eye she saw the mother owl returning from the woods again, gliding on extended wings toward the hole in the barn roof, its stomach gorged from feeding all night. The return of the owl always meant the beginning of a new day, didn't it, one filled with promise and expectation? But this time the owl didn't squeeze back through the hole in the roof. Instead, it flew directly at her face, its talons open.

It grew in size and shape and texture, its wings leathery, enormous in breadth now, flapping in the sky, blocking out the sun. The flapping sound was so loud now it droned in her ears and made the earth around her head tremble.

So this is the way it comes, she thought, and she gagged on her own saliva and felt the hose slip loose from her mouth.

That's when a pair of hands pried a flat stone loose from above her forehead and wiped the dirt from her face and pulled the tape from her eyes and removed a sliver of rock from her tongue. "Billy Bob?" she said.

Then she was being pulled from her grave by each arm, like a crucified figure being lifted from a cross.

"You're going to be all right, lady," the sheriff said. "Don't worry about a thing. We'll have you at the heliport and into St. Pat's in ten minutes."

She stared into the sunlight and at the silhouettes above her and at the humped shape of a helicopter by a stand of ponderosa that grew out of rock. "Billy Bob?" she said.

"Yes," I said.

But she looked down at the river bursting against boulders in the channel below us and at the iridescent spray on the canyon walls, then at the snow

melting on the fir trees and the brown hawks wheeling in the sky and the long green roll of the northern Rockies and she could not find any other words to speak.

Chapter 21

The sheriff sat with me in the waiting room at St. Patrick's Hospital. He watched me walk up and down.

"I'll bring Dixon in. You got my word on it," he said.

"Then what?" I said.