We crossed into Montana south of Billings, and the land began to change. It was green and rolling, the rivers slow-moving and lined with cottonwood and willow trees, with sharp-toothed mountains in the distance. Then as we headed toward the Continental Divide the rivers became wider with the spring runoff, roiling in the center, flooding the trees along the banks, and the mountains in the distance tumbled higher and higher against the sky, their crests still packed with snow, the slopes covered with ponderosa pine and Douglas fir and blue spruce. Alafair slept on the seat beside me, her head on a comic book, while I topped the Divide outside of Butte and began the long grade down the western slope toward Missoula. White-tailed deer grazed near the road in the evening shadows, their heads flickering at me as I roared past them. Log ranch houses were set back against the base of the hills, their windows lighted, smoke flattening off their stone chimneys.
I followed the Clark Fork River through a cut in the mountains called Hellgate Canyon, and suddenly under a bowl of dark sky the city spilled out in a shower of light all the way across the valley floor. Missoula was a sawmill and university town, filled with trees and flowers, old brick homes, wooded parks, intersecting rivers glazed with neon light, the tinge of processed wood pulp, rows of bars where bikers hung in the doorways and the rock music thundered out into the street. My palms were thick and ringing with the pressure of the steering wheel, my ears almost deaf from the long hours of road wind. When I climbed the motel stairs with Alafair asleep on my shoulder, I looked out over the night sheen of the river, at the circle of mountains around the town and the way the timber climbed to the crests, and I wondered if I had any chance at all of having a normal life again, of being an ordinary person who lived in an ordered town like this and who did not wake up each morning with his fears sitting collectively on his chest like a grinning gargoyle.
All of my present troubles had begun with Dixie Lee Pugh, and I felt that their solution would have to begin with him, too. But first I had to make living arrangements for Alafair and me. One of the advantages of being Catholic is that you belong to the western world's largest private club. Not all of its members are the best or most likable people, but many of them are. I rented a small yellow-brick house, with maple and birch trees in the yard, in a working-class neighborhood by the river, only two blocks away from a Catholic church and elementary school. The pastor called the principal at Alafair's school in New Iberia, asked to have her records sent to the rectory, then admitted her to the first-grade class. Then he recommended his housekeeper's widowed sister, who lived next door to the rectory, as a baby-sitter. She was a red-complected, bovine, and good-natured Finnish woman, and she said she could take care of Alafair almost any afternoon or evening, and in case I had to go out of town overnight Alafair could stay at her house.
I bought Alafair a new lunch box, crayons, pencils, and a notebook, and on our third morning in town, I walked her down the tree-lined street to the school yard and watched her form in ranks with the other children while a lay teacher waited to lead them in the Pledge of Allegiance. Drinking a cup of coffee on the front steps of my new home, I watched the high, brown current of the river froth around the concrete pilings of a railway bridge and the sun break above Hellgate Canyon and fall across the valley, lighting the maples as though their leaves were waxed. Then I chewed on a matchstick and studied the backs of my hands. Finally, when I could delay it no longer, in the way you finally accept major surgery or embark on a long journey that requires much more energy than you possess, I got in my truck and headed for the town of Poison and Flathead Lake and the home of Sally Dio.
The Jocko Valley was ranch and feed-grower country, covered with large areas of sun and shadow; the river ran along the side of the highway and was tea-colored with a pebbled bottom and bordered with willows and cottonwoods. In the distance the Mission Mountains rose up blue and snowcapped and thunderous against the sky. The rural towns were full of Indians in work denims, curled-brim straw hats, heel-worn cowboy boots, and pickup trucks, and when I stopped for gas they looked through me as though I were made of smoky glass. There were lakes surrounded by cattails set back against the mountain range, and high up on the cliffs long stretches of waterfall were frozen solid in the sunlight like enormous white teeth.
I passed a Job Corps camp and an old Jesuit mission, and followed the highway over a pine-covered hill. Suddenly I saw Flathead Lake open up before me, so blue and immense and dancing with sunlight that it looked like the Pacific Ocean. Young pines grew on the slopes of the hills above the beaches, and the eastern shore was covered with cherry orchards. Out in the lake were islands with gray cliffs and trees rooted among the rocks, and a red sailboat was tacking between two islands, clouds of spray bursting off its bow. ' I stopped in Poison, which was at the south end of the lake, and asked a filling station operator for directions to Sal Dio's house. He took a cigar out of his mouth, looked at me, looked at my license plate, and nodded up the road.
"It's about two miles," he said.
"Which side of the road?"
"Somebody up there can tell you."
I drove up the road between the cherry orchards and the lake, then passed a blue inlet, a restaurant built out over the water, a strip of white beach enclosed by pine trees, until I saw a mailbox with the name Dio on it and a sign that said Private Road. I turned into the dirt lane and started up an incline toward a split-level redwood home that was built on a triangular piece of land jutting out above the lake. But up ahead was an electronically operated iron gate that was locked shut, and between the gate and the lake was a small redwood house whose veranda was extended on pilings over the edge of the cliff. It was obvious that the small and the large houses had been designed by the same architect.
I stopped the truck at the gate, turned off the engine, and got out. I saw a dark-skinned girl with black hair looking at me from the veranda of the small house; then she went inside through sliding glass doors and Clete walked out in a pair of Bermuda shorts, a T-shirt that exposed his bulging stomach, a crushed porkpie fishing hat, and a powder-blue windbreaker that didn't conceal his revolver and nylon shoulder holster.
He walked across the lawn and down the hill to the road.
"Man, I don't believe it. Did they cut you loose?" he said.
"I'm out on bond."
"Out on bond and out of the state? That doesn't sound right, Streak." He was grinning at me in the sunlight.
"I know the bondsman."
"You want to go fishing?"
"I need to talk to Dixie Lee."
"You came to the right place. He's up there with Sally."
"I need to talk to you, too."
"Sounds like our First District days."
"It becomes that way when you're about to do a jolt in Angola."
"Come on, it's not going to happen. You had provocation to go after those guys. Then it was two against one, and finally it's your word against Mapes's about the shank. Besides, check out Mapes's record. He's a sick motherfucker if you ask me. Wait till your lawyer cross-examines him on the stand. The guy's as likable as shit on melba toast."
"That's another thing that bothers me, Cletus how you know about these guys."
"It's no mystery, partner," he said, and took a package of Lucky Strikes out of his windbreaker pocket. The outline of his revolver was blue and hard against the nylon holster.
"Dixie Lee brought them around a couple of times. They liked to cop a few free lines off Sal and hang around some of these rock people he's always flying in. Sal collects rock people. Vidrine was a fat dimwit, but Mapes should have been eased off the planet a long time ago."
The skin of Clete's face was tight as he lit his cigarette and looked off at the lake.