Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

"I spit it out the first time. The second time I let him put it in my mouth. That bastard won, didn't he?" she said.

"No. They're cowards. Their kind never win," I said.

But my words were useless. She squeezed her temples and lowered her head, her eyes shut. I sat beside her and placed my arm around her and felt her shaking, as though an incurable coldness had invade her body.

I STAYED with Temple until she fell asleep, then covered her up and left a note to the effect that would return later in the day.

I drove west of town, through green pastureland and small horse ranches with new red barns am white fences, then up the dirt road that led to Terry Witherspoon's shack above the Clark Fork River. I parked in the clearing and banged on his door and looked in his windows, then walked around back.

A trash fire was burning in a rusty oil barrel. The thick curds of black smoke rolling from it were laced with an eye-watering stench. I found a rake in a tool-shed and kicked the barrel on its side and combed out the contents.

In the tangle of wire and cans and tinfoil he hadn't bothered to separate out from his ignitable trash were plastic bottles of motor oil, animal entrails and strips of fur, and a blackened roll of pipe tape.

I went back into the toolshed and hunted in the corners and under a molded canvas tarp and in a huge wood locker box full of tractor parts. Then I pushed over a stack of bald tires and found an Army surplus entrenching tool that had been propped inside, the blade still locked in the right-angle position of a hoe, the tip scratched a dull silver from fresh digging.

Just as I went outside I saw Witherspoon walk into the clearing, a wood rabbit with a bloody head hanging from his belt, a.22 bolt-action rifle over his shoulder. A bone-handled skinning knife in a scabbard was stuck down in his side pocket. For just a moment he looked like a nineteenth-century illustration in a Mark Twain novel.

"What do you think you're doing?" he asked.

"Tearing your place up. You couldn't bring yourself to get rid of the E-tool, could you? You're a mountain man. A mountain man needs all his equipment," I said.

"Stay away from me," he said. I slapped him across the face, so hard the light went out of his eyes and his glasses swung from one ear. He peeled his glasses off his head and stared at me in disbelief.

"Go ahead. Throw down on me," I said.

"You've got a gun in your belt."

"That's right," I said, and slapped him again. My handprint was bright red on his cheek and there was spittle on his chin. "Where's Wyatt?"

"I don't know. Why don't you go to his house instead of coming here?" he said, his eyes blinking in anticipation of being hit again.

"Because he's not going to be there. Because he's not as stupid as you are."

I ripped his rifle from his shoulder and whipped it by the barrel against a pine trunk. The stock snapped in half and spun crazily, like a splintered baseball bat, out into the trees.

Then I headed for Terry Witherspoon again.

"Wyatt's at a rodeo in Billings. Carl flies him to all his rodeos," he said hurriedly. Involuntarily his thumb hooked over the bone handle of his knife.

I hit him with my fist and knocked him on the ground. Then I knelt over him and knotted his shirt in one hand and pulled the.38 from my belt and gripped it by the barrel, the butt curved outward, like a hammer.

"Does it make you feel powerful to bury a woman alive, Terry?" I asked.

"I didn't do it," he replied.

"Do what? Say what you did not do. How do you know what I'm talking about?"

His words bound in his throat and his eyes looked at mine and filled with genuine terror.

"I didn't do whatever you're talking about. I been here. I don't have a car. I can't go anywhere."

I dropped the pistol to the ground and drove my fist into the center of his face, then released his shirt and clenched my hand on his throat, pinching off his air, and raised my right fist again.

On the edge of the clearing, his Stetson and striped black suit cut by a shaft of sunlight, I saw L.Q. Navarro looking at me, his gold toothpick between his teeth, his lips pursed as though he were witnessing a spectacle that offended moral paradigms he considered mandatory in his friends.

I pulled Terry Witherspoon to his feet and shoved him toward the woods and kicked him in the tail-bone.

"Get out of here," I said.