Bitterroot Read Online Free PDF

straight ahead.
    She walked away, toward the bar.
    “Who is that?” Cleo said.
    “I don’t know. But I don’t like eating at the O.K. Corral,” I said.
    I got up from the table and went back to the bar.
    “Your food’s getting cold, Doc,” I said.
    “I was just coming,” he replied. Then he said to the bikers, “Y’all think on it. Why get your wick snuffed being somebody’s hump? I’ll check with you later.”
    I placed my hand under his arm and gently pulled him with me.
    “What’s wrong with you?” I said.
    “You just got to turn these guys around. It’s the rednecks who win the wars. The liberals are waiting around on a grant.”
    “We’re eating supper, then blowing this place. Or at least I am.”
    “You’re in Montana. This is no big deal.”
    He cut into his steak and put a piece into his mouth and drank from his beer, his eyes looking reflectively at the three engineers from the gold mine.
    I waited for him to start in on another soliloquy, but an event taking place in the bar had suddenly captured his attention.
    Two men and a woman had come in, people who were obviously from somewhere else, their features soft around the edges, their shoulders rounded, their faces circumspect yet self-indulgent and vaguely adventurous. They had taken a booth in the bar, then perhaps one of them had glanced at the bikers, or said something or laughed in a way a biker did not approve of, or maybe it was just their bad luck that their physical weakness gave off an odor like raw meat to a tiger.
    One of the bikers took a toothpick out of his mouth and set it in an ashtray. He rose from his chair and walked to their booth, drinking from a long-necked beer bottle, his jeans bagging in the seat. He stared down at them, not speaking, the stench of his body and clothes rising into their faces like a stain.
    “Somebody’s got to put a tether on those boys,” Doc said.
    “Don’t do it, Tobin,” I said.
    Doc wiped the steak grease off his mouth and hands with a napkin, the alcoholic warmth gone from his eyes now, and walked back toward the bar.
    Cleo rested her forehead on her fingers and let out her breath.
    “This was a mistake. It’s time to go,” she said. She looked up at me. “Aren’t you going to do something?”
    “It’s somebody else’s fight,” I said.
    “How chivalric,” she said.
    “Doc resents people mixing in his business.”
    “I’m going to get him out of there if you won’t.”
    “Ask the waitress for the check,” I said, and returned to the bar area.
    The biker towering over the three tourists wore a leather vest with no shirt and steel-toed engineering boots; his jaws and chin were heavy with gold stubble, his hair tangled in snakes like a Visigoth’s. His arms were scrolled with tattoos of daggers dripping blood, helmeted skulls, swastikas, a naked woman in a biker cap chained by the wrists to motorcycle handlebars. The three people in the booth looked at nothing, their hands and bodies motionless, their mouths moving slightly, as though they did not know which expression they wanted their faces to form.
    “Excuse me, but you were pinning my friends,” the biker said. “Then I got the impression you cracked wise about something. Like your shit don’t stink, like other people ain’t worthy of respect. I just want you to know we ain’t got no beef with nobody. Ain’t no biker here gonna hurt you. Everybody cool with that?”
    The two men in the booth started to nod imperceptibly, as though their acquiescence would open a door in an airless, superheated room. But the biker was watching the woman.
    “You want another beer?” he asked her. He reached out with one finger and touched her lips. “Smile for me. Come on, you got a nice mouth. You don’t want to walk around with a pout on it.”
    Her throat swallowed and her eyes were shiny, her nostrils dilated and white on the edges.
    “Here, let me show you,” the biker said. He worked his finger into her mouth, wedging it