“You’re saying maybe Sally Dio survived the crash?”
“No, I’m saying don’t ever lie to a federal agent again. Anything else on your mind?”
“Yeah, Clete Purcel is outside in my truck. He’s the best cop I’ve ever known. He’s a recipient of two Purple Hearts, the Silver Star, and the Navy Cross. He also happens to have enormous affection and respect for you. Why don’t you give him a break?”
AT A CERTAIN time in your life, you think about death in a serious way, and you think about it often. You see your eyes and mouth impacted by dirt, your clothes a moldy receptacle for water leaking through the topsoil. You see a frozen mound backlit by a wintry sky, a plain of brown grass with tumbleweed bouncing across it. Inside the mound, if your ears could hear, they would tell you the shovel that raises you into light again will do so only for reasons of scientific curiosity.
When you see these images in your sleep or experience them in your waking day, you know they do not represent a negotiable fate. The images are indeed your future, and no exception will be made for you.
During these moments, when you try to push away these images from the edges of your vision, you have one urge only, and that is to somehow leave behind a gesture, a cipher carved on a rock, a good deed, some visible scratch on history that will tell others you were here and that you tried to make the world a better place.
The great joke is that any wisdom most of us acquire can seldom be passed on to others. I suspect this reality is at the heart of most old people’s anger.
What does this have to do with the murder of the two college kids and the attack on Clete and perhaps the murder of the Los Angeles tourists west of Missoula?
Everything.
Because anger is what I felt that afternoon when I looked at the television monitor attached to the StairMaster I was working out on in the health club on the Bitterroot highway. Reverend Sonny Click was evidently moving up in the world and had become the host of a televangelical daytime show featuring — guess who — the Reverend Sonny Click.
The aggressiveness of his overture to the audience was as naked as it was meretricious. “Out there right now someone is debating whether they should send in that one-thousand-dollar seed-of-faith gift to our crusade. I can hear your thoughts, the fury of the debate raging inside your heart. ‘Is it worth it? Is this what God wants me to do?’ I’ll tell you what Our Lord has told me to tell you.”
He looked earnestly into the camera, handsome in his tailored dark suit and starched white shirt and luminescent pink necktie. “If you pledge your seed-of-faith one-thousand-dollar gift, you will immediately be joined with God in all your endeavors. Your adversaries will become His adversaries. Your economic burdens will become His economic burdens. The physical illnesses in your life, the turmoil in your home, the unkindness with which the world has treated you will all be transferred into His hands.
“You will not become God’s partner. God will become your partner. That’s what the seed of faith does. It allows God to take every hardship and every enemy in your life from you and to reduce them to dust in His palm.”
The camera panned on a choir of college-age kids who looked like they had been scrubbed with wire brushes, all of them clapping and singing, their faces seemingly lit by ethereal forces.
I showered and changed into fresh clothes at the health club, then drove out to the home of Reverend Sonny Click, east of Rock Creek. His Mercury was in the driveway, and his twin-engine plane was on the runway he had mowed in the pasture. His house was built of logs that had never been debarked. With its shady front porch and riparian backdrop, it should have resembled a sport fisherman’s rustic cottage in an advertisement for western real estate. But to my mind, the yellow lawn and the dead flowers in the window boxes and a cluster of plastic cups under the steps told a different story about Sonny Click. He was one of those who did not have geographical ties. He floated on the wind, as all predator birds do, searching out his prey, the bead of light in his eyes as steady and unrelenting as the sun, his hunger never quite satiated.
When he answered the door, I could hear a teakettle whis
tling in the kitchen. “I told you not to come around here again,” he said.
“Is that college girl with you?” I asked.
“No, she’s not. Now get out of here.”
“Not a smart answer,” I said, and pushed him in the chest as I stepped inside.
His mouth dropped open. “Are you crazy?”
“No, I often experience visions of mortality,” I said, pushing him in the chest again, back toward the kitchen. “Know what that means? I don’t give a rat’s ass what people do to me or think about me. If I can hose a skid mark like you off the bowl before I catch the bus, I figure I’m way ahead of the game.” I glanced through the open door of the bedroom. “Where’s the girl I met here before?”
“I don’t know. I don’t keep track of her.”
“There’s a woman’s nightgown on your dresser.”
“I’m not going to put up with this,” he said.
From the counter, I picked up an empty tin pot by the handle and swung it against the side of his head. His face quivered with both shock and disbelief. I hit him with it again, this time harder. A small cry broke from his throat, and he cupped one hand over his nose, blood leaking down his wrist.
“I don’t have any mercy on a man like you, Mr. Click,” I said. “The last time I was here, I told you I’d shove you into an airplane propeller if I caught you sexually abusing that young woman. I’m not sure if that’s the case here or not. But I do know you lied to me about Seymour Bell and Cindy Kershaw. You held their pictures in your hand. You studied them. Then you looked me straight in the face and told me you’d never seen them before. Those kids died terrible deaths. But when they needed you to speak up for them, to help us find their killers, you put your own interests first and denied knowing them. It takes a special kind of coward to do that, Mr. Click.”
I could see the fear growing in his eyes as he looked at my expression and heard my words and realized that all the rules of constraint and procedure and protocol that had always kept him safe had just been vacuumed out of his life. He backed against the stove, the spout of the teakettle touching his spine, sending a tremor through his body. He wiped the blood from his nose with the flat of his hand, then tried to wipe it off with the other palm, smearing it on both hands. The texture of his face looked coarse, ingrained with dirt somehow, as though the personae he had presented to the world were melting off his skin like makeup under a heat lamp.
“I need to turn off the burner,” he said.
“No, you need to tell me why those two kids died. What did they have on the Wellstones?”