Chapter 30

It rained just before dawn, then the sun rose inside the mist on the hills and through my window I could see the pale green shapes of cottonwoods swelling in the wind and a lone black bear running past Lucas's tent, as though the pinkness of the morning had caught it in a dishonest act.

Doc came into my bedroom and set down a cup of coffee for me on the nightstand and pulled up a chair next to my bed.

"That ATF agent, Rackley, the one who was hassling you?" he said.

"What about him?"

"He called while you were still asleep. He left this number," Doc said.

"He must be an early riser," I said.

"Why you been sleeping with L.Q.'s gun on your nightstand the last couple of nights?"

"I sent a letter to Wyatt Dixon and told him a few things about Witherspoon, including the fact he had AIDS."

Doc nodded reflectively. "Where'd you come by all this information?" he asked.

"Temple got ahold of Witherspoon's welfare and juvie records. I made up the stuff about AIDS."

Doc got up from his chair and propped his hands on the windowsill and stared out at the morning.

"I thought I had an iron bolt through both temples," he said.

I shaved and brushed my teeth and dressed and called the number Amos Rackley had left.

"Meet me inside the University of Montana football stadium in a half hour," he said.

"What for?"

"I have something for you. You bring anybody with you, I'm gone."

I drove through Hellgate Canyon and took the university exit and parked by the stadium. A half dozen hang gliders were floating on the breezes high up on Mount Sentinel, their shadows swooping across the green slopes beneath them. I walked into the great emptiness of the stadium and saw Amos Rackley sitting twenty rows up on the fifty-yard line.

He wore shades and a brown rain hat and an open-neck checkered shirt and khakis and sandals with white socks. He could have been an academic who had strolled off for a moment's respite from his summer classes. For the first time I noticed a religious chain around his neck.

"Open your shirt for me, would you?" he said.

"That's a little silly, isn't it?" I said.

"So you don't have to be offended," he replied, and waited.

I unbuttoned my shirt and pulled it out of my trousers and turned in a circle.

"Sit down and let me explain something, although you probably already know the drill," he said. A manila envelope rested on his knees. "All federal law enforcement agencies use informants. A good agent flips the right guy and puts a lot of nasty people in the gray-bar hotel chain. But once in a while an agent gets too jacked up on a case and forgets he's allowed a sociopath to run loose with a baseball bat."

"You're talking about Lamar Ellison?"

"As time went by we became more and more convinced he and some other bikers tried to kidnap Cleo Lonnigan's child. The father probably showed up and the bikers killed them both. We couldn't prove it, though, so we gave Ellison a long leash and used him."

"Except you didn't nail anybody and Carl Hinkel probably had other children kidnapped and sold to perverts, including Sue Lynn's little brother?"

Rackley looked out at Hellgate Canyon and the wind bending the ponderosa along the edges of the cliffs and the hang gliders that hovered and dipped against the immense blueness of the sky.

"I quit the Bureau," he said. "There are two signed and notarized affidavits in this envelope. One is from Sue Lynn Big Medicine, admitting she set fire to Lamar Ellison. The other statement is from me, describing her role as an informant for the ATE If anyone wants to question either her or me, I wish them good luck, get my drift?"

He placed the envelope in my hands.

"They'll come after you," I said.

"Could be. I doubt it. A stock brokerage doesn't prosecute the employees it fires for embezzlement." He got up from his seat and removed his hat and ran his hand through his close-cropped hair, then replaced his hat and looked at the panorama of mountains that enclosed the city.

"I hear the Canadian Rockies are great this time of year," I said.

"I've always been a flatlander. Stay away from Carl Hinkel's compound, Mr. Holland, unless you want to end up on a recording."

"You finally got a wire inside?"

"Put it this way. I've got the sense somebody unscrewed Wyatt Dixon's head and spit inside it. You don't happen to know anything about that, do you?"

"Not a thing," I said, my gaze fixed straight ahead.

He walked down the cement steps to the exit. He didn't look back.

Wyatt Dixon had a simple vision of life. You ate your pain, you shined the world on, and you accepted inequity as the natural state of man. The only unforgivable sin was personal betrayal.

The paling of the sky at dawn, the place the sun occupied at noon or twilight, the rain or ice or drought that wore away the surfaces of the earth had nothing to do with a man's fate. You took your first breath with a slap. If you were lucky, your mouth found a teat before you starved. You grew out of your own excretions and ate what you were given, carried slop to hogs, shucked chicken feathers in scalding water, split smokehouse wood, chopped and picked cotton, punched and dehorned cows, shot mustangs and wild burros for dog food contractors, and maybe put your seed in a Mexican girl inside a bean field. Then, one morning, at age fifteen, you walked past the waiting school bus to the train tracks and climbed aboard a freight that carried you all the way to Big D and an Army enlistment center.

Wyatt liked the Army. He liked the food, the good clothes, the PX beer, the access to fine guns. The problem was the Army didn't like Wyatt. Or at least the black mess sergeant didn't after Wyatt asked him if he had a tail tucked inside his pants.

The base psychiatrist said Wyatt had antisocial tendencies. The mess sergeant probably agreed after Wyatt broke his nose with a bottle behind a bar in San Antonio and cut his stripes off and stuffed them into his mouth.

While he was in the stockade waiting for his uncle to show up with a birth certificate, Wyatt tried to figure how to avoid getting himself jammed up like this again. He finally figured it out. Stay off the computer.

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 twenty-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.