“I don’t know about those things. I’m a preacher. If you’re saying I’m tempted by the flesh, then I’m guilty. But I didn’t kill or hurt anybody.”
I cannot offer an adequate explanation for what happened next. Maybe it was Click’s disingenuousness; maybe it was the fact that he used the teachings of Jesus to deceive and betray the young people who trusted him; or maybe it was just the bloodlust that had lived inside me for most of my adult life.
The manifestation was always the same. It was like an alcoholic blackout, except the kind of blackout I’m describing occurred most often when I was not drinking. A red-black balloon would fill the inside of my head, and I would hear sounds like trains passing or high winds blowing among cresting waves, and I would experience a coppery taste in the back of my throat like pennies or the acidic taste in your saliva when your gums are bleeding. My age, my service overseas, my attempts to repudiate violence in my life, my membership in Alcoholics Anonymous, and my participation in my church community would have no influence on the events that would follow.
Clete had saved me from myself in many instances. But this time he was not around.
I drove my fist into Sonny Click’s face and felt his upper lip split against his teeth. Then I hit him in the stomach, doubling him over. I’m not sure of the exact order of the things I did to him next. I could hear the teakettle screaming and feel its steam boiling my cheek and neck as I pulled open the oven door and shoved his head and shoulders inside. I turned on the gas and smelled its raw odor gush from the unlit jets below the grill. When he struggled, I kicked him in the back of the thigh, collapsing his purchase on the floor, and held him down tighter against the grill.
“Why did those kids die?” I asked.
“The burner’s on,” he said, the side of his face wedged into the steel wires, his nostrils flecked with blood around the rims. “The room will explode.”
“Answer my question. Why did they die?”
“Things happen inside the Wellstone house that nobody knows about. The girl, Cindy, tried to tell me something. I didn’t want to hear it. I was afraid. I hope she’ll forgive me.”
I tightened my hold on his neck and shoved his head harder into the grill. I could feel an even more dangerous level of anger rising inside me. “Don’t pretend you’re a repentant man. You molested that girl who was here, didn’t you?”
“She’s of legal age.”
I raised his head slightly and smashed it again into the grill.
“Yes, I slept with her,” he said. “I’m sorry for what I did. The gas is going to ignite and we’re going to die. Don’t do this. I’ll make it right. I’ll go away and you’ll never see me again. Whatever you want, just tell me and I’ll do it.”
I pulled him from the oven and turned off the gas feed to both the oven and the burner under the teakettle. Click was crying, his face trembling, tears coursing down his cheeks. A dark stain had spread through the crotch of his slacks.
“Get up,” I said.
When he didn’t move, I lifted him by the front of his shirt and threw him in a chair. “Who burglarized Seymour Bell’s house in Bonner?”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
There was a long silence. Outside, I could see the wind blowing in the trees that grew on a slope across the river. Sonny Click’s eyes followed my hand as I placed it behind my back. “What are you doing?” he asked.
“Cops call this kind of gun a ‘drop.’ The numbers are acid-burned. It has no prints on it. It can’t be traced back to me. What did the intruder take from Seymour Bell’s house?”
He looked at me blankly, his mouth a round O. I forced the barrel of the thirty-two over his teeth and pulled back the hammer. His eyes bulged from their sockets as he stared up into my face. Then he began to tremble all over, his teeth clicking on the steel.
I said, “If you make me jerk the trigger, the round will punch a hole through the base of your skull.”
But by now he was shaking so badly he had to grip the sides of the chair to keep his upper torso stationary. He tried to speak and gagged on his words.
“Say it again,” I said, removing the pistol from his mouth.
“Nobody told me about a burglary. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and shoot me,” he said. “What kind of man are you? What kind of man would do this?”
“Somebody who’s too old and tired to care. Sayonara, Mr. Click. If you see me coming, cross the street.”
I walked back outside and let the door slam behind me. I could smell smoke from a forest fire in the wind and dust blowing out of a rain squall farther down the Clark Fork gorge. Had Click lied? Did he know more than he had told me? I doubted it. But it was his question to me that I couldn’t let go of. What kind of man was I? he had asked. My answer to him had been both facile and cynical. The fact was, in moments like these, I had no idea who actually lived inside my skin.
I FOUND AN A.A. meeting that afternoon in Missoula, but I did not introduce myself when the woman leading the meeting asked out-of-town visitors to do so. Nor did I speak during the meeting or afterward. I got caught in a traffic detour downtown and passed Stockman’s bar and a place called the Oxford and another bar called Charlie B’s and one called the Silver Dollar by the railroad tracks. Two Indians were sitting on a curb in front of the Silver Dollar, drinking from a flat-sided bottle wrapped tightly in a paper sack. They were half in shadow and half in sunlight, squinting up into the brightness of the afternoon, the reddish-amber tint of the liquor glinting like the flash of a stained diamond whenever they tilted the bottle to their lips.
I cleared my throat and swallowed and took a candy bar from the glove box and bit into it. Then I drove into the university district and parked in front of the church where Molly and I attended Mass when we were in Missoula. The priest was my age and had grown up in the smelter town of Anaconda. His ancestors had worked in the mines and had been members of the Molly Maguires and the IWW in an era when Irish working people had paid back in kind, sometimes with dynamite dropped in the bottom of the hole. We went into his office, one that looked out upon maple trees and shady lawns and big stone houses with huge blue spruces in the yards. I told him what I had done to the Reverend Sonny Click, sparing nothing, including the systematic degradation I had put Click through.
The priest was a tall, raw-boned man with an aquiline profile and a taciturn manner that belied his strong feelings, particularly about social justice. I thought I might get a free ride.
Wrong.