Bitterroot (Billy Bob Holland 3)

"What are you going to do?"

"She deliberately smashed in the front of Wyatt Dixon's car."

"Witherspoon started it. She should have run over him," I said.

"I can't believe you're an attorney."

I waited in the silence. Then I said, "Did you call here for another reason?"

I heard him exhale against the phone receiver. "I drove out to Cleo Lonnigan's yesterday. She told me this ATF agent, this guy Rackley, was out to see her last week. Rackley says her son and husband were probably killed by outlaw bikers."

"How do you know he actually said this?"

"I called him up. He says Lamar Ellison may have been mixed up in it."

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

"Because maybe Cleo was right all along and I was saying otherwise. Because maybe other individuals had reason to set Lamar Ellison on fire."

"Did you tell that to the district attorney?"

"None of your business," he said.

"You're a good man, Sheriff."

"Tell my old woman that. Have you seen Sue Lynn Big Medicine?"

"No, sir."

"Where's your son?"

After a beat, I said, "I couldn't say right offhand."

"That's what I thought," the sheriff said. The line went dead.

I walked into the kitchen, where Doc was washing out three gutted rainbows in the sink and rinsing the rubber liner of his creel.

"Why would Nicki Molinari insist West Coast wiseguys killed Cleo's husband and son if somebody else did it?" I asked.

"People are scared of the Mob. He wants to hold a threat over her head without seeming to be involved."

The clarity of Doc's reply made me wonder about the depth and adequacy of my own thought processes.

Terry Witherspoon did not have memories, not in the ordinary sense. The high school he attended had been a place he went in the morning and left in the afternoon, neither better nor worse for the experience. He learned that reticence ensured he would not be bothered by others; in fact, reticence in school was a way to purchase virtual invisibility. If pressed in a difficult situation, he just grinned at the corner of his mouth and flipped his hair out of his face and let others wonder what was on his mind.

Teachers pretended to believe in the importance of what they taught, art and history, save the Earth, respect your fellowman, but they shopped at Wal-Mart like everybody else, while their neighbors' businesses went under. His classmates sang in church on Sundays and Wednesday nights but somehow the girls got pregnant anyway. He wondered why they all spent so much time convincing themselves they were somebody else.

When he was a junior in high school his father, who fixed bicycles and sharpened lawn mowers, was seventy-two and his mother sixty. The three of them lived in a small house at the end of an alley, behind a loan agency, and did not own a car. Across the street was an empty lot where black people planted gardens in the spring. Terry's mother often cleaned houses with black people and made friends with them and worked alongside them in their gardens. When she came home at night, sometimes with a paper bag full of vegetables, she smelled of sweat and the dirt in her clothes. In fact, she smelled just like the black people she worked with.

A little girl broke her tooth on a BB that was inside a watermelon picked from the field. Terry was caught on the loan agency's rooftop a week later, air rifle in hand.

Aside from his two-beer visit to the VFW hall every Saturday afternoon, Terry's father spent most of his waking hours in his shed, which was hung with bicycle frames and wheels and narrow tires. He seldom wore his false teeth and his cheeks were collapsed inward on his jawbones so that his expression was wizened and severe, although in reality he appeared to have no emotions at all.

The night of the junior prom Terry went into the shed to tell his father supper was ready.

"What's your name again?" the father said.

"My name? I'm Terry."