Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

Come see me anytime in the next few decades. I'll be here.

Please consider this letter an apology to Ms. Carrol as well.

Best to you both, Xavier Girard

After the charges against Doc were dropped, Temple and Lucas and I drove back to Texas through the northern tip of New Mexico and stopped for the night at Clayton, a short distance from the Texas state line. We walked from the motel at the end of what had been a scorching day to a nineteenth-century hotel named the Eklund and had dinner in a dining room paneled with hand-carved mahogany. The hotel was three stories, built of quarried stone, anchored in the hardpan like a fortress against the wind, but the guest rooms had long ago been boarded up and the check-in desk and boxes for mail and metal keys abandoned to dust and cobweb.

On the wall of the small lobby was a framed photograph of the outlaw Black Jack Ketchum being fitted with a noose on a freshly carpentered scaffold. Another photograph showed him after the trapdoor had collapsed under his feet. Ketchum was dressed in a black suit and white shirt and his face showed no expression in the moments before his death, as though he were a witness to a predictable historical event rather than a participant in it.

Most of the patrons entering or leaving the dining room were local people and took no notice of the photographic display.

Temple and Lucas and I walked outside under a turquoise sky that was turning yellow with dust. The streets were empty, the air close with the smell of impending rain and a hot odor blowing from the stockyards west of town. We walked past a movie theater called the Luna, its marquee blank, its thick glass doors chain-locked. At the end of the main street a long string of grain cars sat idly on a railway track. The only sounds we heard were a shutter banging and a jukebox playing inside a stucco tavern.

Northwest of us was Raton Pass, a steep, pinyon-dotted canyon that leads out of the mesa country into the old mining town of Trinidad and the beginning of the Rocky Mountains, where the glad of heart come on vacation to rediscover the American West. In the morning we would cross the Texas line and drive through the remnants of the old XIT Ranch and into the industrial vastness of the twenty-first century. One city would not be different from another, its petrochemical plants burning as brightly as diamonds at night, offering security and prosperity to all, its shopping malls and multiplex theaters a refutation for those who might argue the merits of an earlier time.

I looked back over my shoulder at the stone rigidity of the hotel and its scrolled-iron colonnade, a huge cloud of orange dust billowing up behind it against the sunset, and I wondered if cattle and railroad barons had hosted champagne dinners in the hotel dining room, or if cowboys off the Goodnight.

Loving Trail had knocked back busthead whiskey in the saloon and shot holes in the ceiling with their six-shooters. Or if the town had never been more than a dusty, wind-blown place on the edge of a stockyard where the most memorable event in its history was a public hanging.

But I think it was all of the above, truly the West, unappealing to those who have seen only its facsimile, found in no tourist brochure, the old buildings creaking with heat and decay, awaiting the arrival one day of those children of John Calvin who saw down forests and poison rivers with cyanide as votive acts and reconstruct the very places they have just fled.

"Why so quiet?" Lucas asked.

"Was I?" I said.

"We thought maybe we should take a pulse beat," Temple said.

"It's been a hot day," I said, and wiped my forehead on my sleeve.

"Time for some ice cream," Lucas said.

"That's a fine idea," I said.

The three of us walked on down the street to a small grocery store. The bell on the screen door rang when we went inside. An elderly Mexican man was reading a newspaper in front of a television set with a cracked screen. His skin was creased and brown as chewing tobacco and his eyes pale to the point of having no color, like those of a person who has spent most of his life outdoors in harsh light.

He folded his newspaper loosely on a chair and walked behind the counter and looked at us expectantly, bemused by our presence in his store, perhaps embarrassed by the paucity of his goods and the little he might have to offer.

It's funny the places you end up.

***