Then he would be borne aloft by a horse named Bad Medicine, a piece of corkscrewing, sunfishing black lightning so wired and mean that some riders said he was one step short of a predator. In the first three seconds, Wyatt thought his buttocks would be split up the middle. A violent pain arced through his rectum into his genitals, his teeth jarred, and the discs in his spine fused into a bent iron chain that set his sciatic nerve aflame. He leaned so far back with each thud and jolt of the twelve hundred pounds between his legs that the rim of his hat touched Bad Medicine’s rump. All the while Wyatt kept one hand pointed high in the air, raising his knees, slashing down his spurs, the rowels spinning and glittering like serrated dimes, his red-fringed butterfly chaps flapping, his silver-plated championship buckle biting into his navel, his scrotum tingling with the thrill of victory, the buzzer as loud in his head as a foghorn, the crowd going crazy.
He had a house and nine acres up on the Blackfoot, all of it sandwiched between the riverbank and an abandoned railway grade up on the mountain. Half of the wood house had been crushed by a winter flood and ice jam and was never repaired, but Wyatt lived comfortably in the remaining half, cooking his food either on a Dutch oven in the yard or on a woodstove inside, and fishing with worms for German browns and rainbow trout at sunset. The access to the house was by an old log road no one else used, or by a pedestrian swing bridge that was not for the faint of heart.
Wyatt liked his life. What he did not like was people messing with it. He provided rough stock at rodeos from Calgary to Cheyenne, and sometimes he still put on greasepaint and football cleats and fought the bulls for riders who had been thrown into the dirt. He paid his bills, gave witness at revivals on the rez, and filed a 1040 each year. He called it “taking care of my side of the street.”
Just that afternoon, his neighbors across the river were having a party on the lawn, the stereo blaring rap music that was the equivalent of broken glass in his ears. Wyatt’s solution? He waded barefoot into the stream, the cold numbing his feet, rocks cutting the soles. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Shut up that goddamn racket before I have to come over there!”
Stereo off. People leave the yard and disappear into the house. All quiet on the Blackfoot. End of problem.
Then he got into his pickup and drove up the dirt road to the two-lane and headed for a bar called the Wigwam, on the edge of the Salish Indian reservation.
It was sunset when he arrived, and the air was cold and sweet with the smell of the Jocko River and the wheel lines blowing water in a fine mist across the fields, electricity leaping inside a bank of thunderheads in the north. Rows of motorcycles were parked in front of the bar, and booted guys in leather vests and chaps, with road tans and jailhouse tats and a lot of body hair, were outside smoking and chugging beer, enjoying the breeze and the view of the Jocko Valley and the Mission Mountains rising straight up into the clouds, the rock face of each mountain so high above the floor of the valley that the waterfalls stay frozen year round.
As Wyatt stepped up on the porch and went inside, the bikers tried not to look directly at him or let their tone of voice change or their words catch in their throats. Each man was left wondering if anyone had detected the few seconds of uncontrolled fear that had gripped his heart.
Wyatt sat at a table in the back of the saloon and ordered, and soon an enormous Indian in a floppy black hat and jeans whose cuffs were stained with green manure sat down with him, his face as expressionless as a skillet. Wyatt wrote out a check and tore it loose from his checkbook and handed it to the Indian. The Indian folded the check and buttoned it into his shirt pocket and shook hands and left, hardly speaking a word. Then a second and a third Indian came to the table and sat down with Wyatt and received a check and left. When Wyatt looked up again, two large men, one in a deputy’s uniform, the other in a baggy suit, were standing in his light.
“Howdy-doody, boys,” he said.
“The sheriff wants to see you,” the man in the suit said.
“How’d y’all know where to find me?”
“Your neighbors across the river,” the uniformed deputy said, smiling. He was an auxiliary and hardly more than a boy and had a mouth like a girl’s.
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Funny place to drink soda pop, Wyatt,” the man in the suit said. He glanced up at the stage, where three girls were gyrating and twisting on chromed poles. “I’d think you’re too old for eye candy.”
“I do business with a bunch of feed growers and cutting-horse breeders up the Jocko. This is where I meet them at.”
“That’s interesting. We didn’t know that,” the man in the suit said, jotting something on a notepad. He was a plainclothes sheriff’s detective by the name of Bill Pepper whose manner and way of doing business seemed to come from an earlier time. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes and wore his hair in a buzz cut and spoke with a Deep South accent, although he had been with LAPD many years and never mentioned where he’d grown up. His eyes were recessed and as dead as buckshot, his lips gray, his coat slightly askew from the lead-weighted blackjack shaped like a darning sock that he carried in the right pocket.
“Is this about that girl who says I shot an arrow at her?”
“She’s not a girl. She’s a grown woman. Grown women are sensitive about that these days.”
“So that’s what this is about?”
“What do you think?”
“I got no idea.”
“I left a business card in your door. I left one in your mailbox, too.”
“People stick trash in my door and mailbox every day.”
“Want to sit in a cell tonight?” Pepper said.
Wyatt folded his hands on top of the table, his face tight. He blew his nose on a bandana and stuck the bandana in his pocket. “I ain’t shot an arrow at nobody. I told that to your deputy. I told it to the girl and her father. Don’t fuck with me.”
“Lot of people say you’re a mean motor scooter. Is that what you are? A mean motor scooter?”
Wyatt stared straight ahead, his pupils like small black insects frozen inside glass.
“Let me ask you another question. You come in here a lot?” Pepper said.
“When I’m of a mind to.”
The plainclothes detective’s pen had gone dry. He clicked the button on it several times, then took another pen from his shirt pocket. “You know what ‘fortuitous’ means? In this instance it means we might be looking at you in a new light. Were you in here about a week ago?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you know an Indian girl by the name of Angel Deer Heart?”
“A little bitty thing, about seventeen or eighteen, her britches hanging off her seat?”
“That’s the one.”
“She’s the granddaughter of a big oilman. Yeah, I saw her in here. A couple of times.”
“You see her last Thursday night?”
“I don’t remember.”
“But you were here?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Yeah, you did.” Pepper wrote again in his notebook. “You feel protective toward young girls?”
“I don’t get around them long enough to be protective.”
“Seems only natural, a rodeo man like you. You see a young thing at the bar with her panties showing, and you cruise on over and buy her a drink and tell her you’ll drive her home because she shouldn’t be hanging in a snatch patch full of guys who’d love to tear her apart. Did something like that happen?”