Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

He traveled the country as a roustabout for a tent preacher, milked rattlesnakes for a veterinarian in West Kansas, slaughtered cattle below the border, daily pumped a hard rubber ball five hundred times in each palm, and by age twen

ty-one was a fullblown rodeo clown, fearless, twice hooked and slammed into the boards, able to knock a horse unconscious with his fist or snap a steer's spinal cord with his bare hands.

Beer-joint women kissed his fingers and men feared them. He chewed cigars like plug tobacco, sewed his own wounds, asked no favors, drank tequila like water, borrowed no money, carried all of his possessions in a cardboard suitcase, read a new comic book every night, wore two-hundred-dollar hats, and stitched an American flag as a liner inside the duster he wore in rainy or cold weather.

But it was the greasepaint grin that bothered his rodeo cohorts. When Wyatt wiped the grease off his face, the lunatic expression was still there, accentuated by eyes that were full of invasiveness and light that had no origin. A female barrel racer claimed he raped her. The board members of the RCA tried to ban him from the circuit.

So what? The good life was always there, sleeping in a bedroll under the stars, sometimes shacking up in a trailer, carrying plenty of cash, drinking beer and eating Mexican food whenever he wanted and grilling steaks in roadside parks up in the high desert. Everybody loved a cowboy. This was a great country, by God.

The only problems in life came from disloyalty. That's what Carl Hinkel didn't understand. A man who claimed to be a patriot and should have known better. But Wyatt knew that under the pose of the Virginia gentleman Carl was weak and dependent. That in itself was forgivable. But ingratitude and disrespect were a form of betrayal, and that was not.

After Carl had called him "boy" and Wyatt had rubbed Carl's nose in it, Carl had tried to straighten it out in the dining room, in front of a half dozen others. Big mistake.

Wyatt was at the steam table, bagging up a lunch to eat out on the riverbank.

"I can't abide a soldier sassing me like that, Wyatt,* Carl said.

"Is that right?" Wyatt said, without looking up from the sandwich he was making.

"You were out of line, son," Carl said.

Wyatt filled the side of a butter knife with mustard and layered it on his sandwich bread, nodding, as though digesting a profound statement.

"Would you hand me those 'maters, Carl?" he said.

Carl gestured to a boy behind the steam table, who picked up a platter of sliced tomatoes and tried to give them to Wyatt. Wyatt ignored him.

"You got what some folks might call a serious character defect, Carl. You cain't cut it on your own. That's why the airborne run you off. That's why you got to surround yourself with a bunch of sawed-off little pissants don't know their own mind. Now get the fuck out of my face."

At DAWN Friday morning Terry woke in his shack above the Clark Fork and saw Wyatt standing against the window, inside the shack, the blue-green softness of the pines and the mists off the river rising up behind him. The fire in the woodstove had gone out and the room was cold, the air brittle. Terry hugged the quilt around him and sat up on his bunk. The German dagger Carl had given him lay on the table in the center of the room, the swastikas on the white handle as bright as drops of blood.

"I knowed a preacher who used to say, 'Fool me oncet, shame on you. Fool me twicet, shame on me,'" Wyatt said. He wore a heavy long-sleeve crimson shirt, with his purple garters on the arms, and tight jeans and his flat-brimmed black hat with the Indian band around the crown.

"I don't know what I did wrong, Wyatt. I don't know why you're mad at me."

Wyatt picked up the dagger and eased it halfway out of the sheath. The chromed blade clicked with light. Why hadn't he put the knife under his pillow? Terry thought. Why did Wyatt have to put his filthy hands on it?

"Carl promoted you?" Wyatt said.

"I'm information officer, if you want to know."

"Going over to Idaho? Meet all them groups at Hayden Lake?"

"Maybe. If Carl tells me to."

Wyatt sat down in a chair and fiddled with the German dagger, never removing it all the way from the sheath. Then he tossed it to Terry.

"I noticed you been coughing a bit. I'm gonna introduce you to a woman used to be a whore down by the railway tracks," Wyatt said. "Why do I want to meet her?"

"She thinks she might know you from the clinic. You call to mind a woman looks like she was just dug up from a cemetery?"

"I don't know what's going on, Wyatt."

"I'll pick you up at seven. Maybe we'll check out the Voss girl again. Or maybe that female private detective. I told Mr. Holland he'd know when it was my ring."

"Carl says it's a bad time for stirring anything up." "Seven o'clock," Wyatt said.

THAT SAME MORNING Temple and I ate breakfast together in a cafe across from the train yard, then walked down Higgins toward the river. Two city police cars had pulled up in front of a saloon, their flashers on, and two uniformed officers had gotten out and were approaching a man who sat like a pile of wet hay on the curb. The officers slipped their batons into the rings on their belts and leaned over and tried to talk with the man on the curb.