Breaking Blue (12 page)

Pend Oreille County had been in existence for seventy-eight years (it was the last county formed in Washington State) when Bamonte began to research his thesis, sifting through a compilation of pokes and stabs, kicks and gunshots, accidents and acts of God. The bare facts, loosely assembled by chronology, were full of storytelling holes; the motives, and in some cases the culprits, were left out. The open mysteries alone could keep a researcher—or a cop—busy for a lifetime. But it was not Bamonte’s intent to solve ancient crimes or discern human motivation beyond the obvious.

The life story of one county, in its raw form, came to him like this:
40 homicides (7 of them unsolved), 130 drownings, 87 fatal industrial accidents, 153 fatal auto accidents, 71 suicides. From this short stack of misery, Bamonte would seek to earn a master’s degree in organizational leadership.

“A compelling idea,” Professor Carey told his student. “But it must be something more than a basic history.”

“Oh, it will be,” Bamonte replied, trying to sound confident, although he doubted his ability to finish such an undertaking. Never a good student, forced to repeat his senior year in high school, Bamonte became interested in academics well into his adult life. And then he was insatiate. “You don’t think this is a dumb idea or anything, do you?”

No, the professor assured him, it was not dumb. Odd, perhaps.

Rather than focus on a single pattern of misdeeds, Bamonte’s approach was to examine history through each of the eleven sheriffs of the county—a life and crimes of the Pend Oreille as seen through the enforcers of legal conduct. History is usually written by the victors; in this case, it would be written by a grunt in a ceaseless war.

“Every crisis ends in resolution, good or bad,” the professor said. “Those who learn from it move on to something higher. Those who don’t are stuck. Tell us if they learned anything. Why did some sheriffs succeed and some fail?”

Bamonte promised coherence in the chronology. He would seek to pass on some wisdom from how the eleven sheriffs dealt with local government. For example, was there a pattern to first sheriff Ben Gardiner’s fight with the county over a livery fee—the twelve hundred dollars a year it cost taxpayers to feed the department’s horses—and a more recent complaint by a sheriff—who parked all the police vehicles until his budget controllers agreed to release more money for gas?

The thesis would begin with Gardiner, who was born in 1866 and never had a first name until “Ben” was bestowed on him later in life, and end with the eleventh and current sheriff—Tony Bamonte himself, a Democrat, serving his third term as chief lawman of Pend Oreille County. There was an inherent conflict in writing about himself, but Bamonte hoped that the last chapter of his thesis would serve
as a demonstration of what the latest of the county sheriffs had learned from the others. It was also an unusual writing technique for an academic project: after pages of passive, third-person storytelling, the narrator would come alive in the last pages.

W
HEN
B
ETTY
B
AMONTE
called her husband to bed, the student looked at the clock—well past midnight—and said he wasn’t ready yet. She rolled over and tried to sleep. They lived on the third floor of an old brick building in the atrophied mining town of Metaline Falls, eight miles south of the Canadian border, forty miles north of Newport, eighty-seven miles from Spokane. Betty was small, attractive, with hair the color of polished oak. Easy to laugh and slow to anger, she was a calm counterweight to her impulsive husband. Tony adored her; she was the only person who came close to understanding him, he felt. But of late, their life together was full of tension. Tony blamed himself for most of it—his fits of despair, his lack of self-esteem, a job that demanded all his time and held him up as a target for the ills of Pend Oreille County. He challenged every bully, whether it was a tavern tough or an arrogant bureaucracy, and took it personally when he lost. The county newspaper was constantly attacking him for trying to shake up the old ways. He saw the master’s degree as an escape from those pressures, a challenge of bringing order to musty chaos, without the usual obstructions.

“Just a few more minutes,” he called out, but Betty was asleep, and he was elsewhere, thinking the curse of historians: what might have been. Working on a thesis was certainly easier than working out a lifetime of personal problems.

“As I studied each sheriff,” he wrote, “I discovered their paths of anguish.”

The night shrinking, he tried to add another few paragraphs. The words came slowly, sometimes stopped at the gate by his own doubt. Writing was so hard. Would the other students laugh at him, the wilderness cop with the backwoods history? Was he really up to a project of this size? Did he have anything to say? And if he flunked,
then what? A retreat back to the old self-paralysis of ten years ago?

He returned to the introduction, thinking about what tied together the ghosts he was pursuing. He wrote: “The history of mankind through the world has been filled with tragedy and violence.”

A cop’s view of the world, no doubt. Nothing about triumphs over ignorance, or scientific breakthroughs that freed generations from disease and early death. By professional background and personal experience, Bamonte took a glum view of things. His life, several years into middle age, had been soaked in hard times, much of it his own doing. As he tried to sketch the first words of his thesis, what came forth were the faces of victims. He loved losers, underdogs. From 1911 to the present, they changed very little; the old stories were not much different than the life he lived every day among the people of the Pend Oreille. The victims had a timeless, even generic quality. The faces had bruises and tears; they dripped blood and they hid themselves in shame. Bamonte had been to their homes, riverfront A-frames without electricity or phone lines. He had been a messenger, delivering news of a dead child found snagged to a log in the river. He had been called out of bed in the middle of the night by a shrieking voice over the phone, begging the sheriff to come save a life; and when he arrived at a cabin where wood stove smoke blended with the smell of pot and beer, the caller’s face was puffy and red and she said it was too late—the abusive husband, the bully, was gone.

Early on in the research, Bamonte realized that he could not detach himself from this history he intended to write. He realized this while following the travails of a particular country doctor in old clippings of the Newport
Miner
—a weekly, the only newspaper in the county. When he came to a story about the doctor’s untimely death, he grieved, feeling as if he had known the man himself.

Bamonte went to bed. In a few hours, the morning light would slip through the fortress of mountains around Metaline Falls, and it would be time to drive the forty miles south to Newport, headquarters of the sheriff’s department. Bamonte pulled the covers up to his neck, snuggled with Betty, but did not sleep. Fresh ideas excited him. Insight into his character was an even more powerful stimulant. As
Bamonte saw it—though he certainly didn’t mention this to Professor Carey—the master’s degree was also a chance to save himself from his own worst instincts. By studying the private anguish of the ten men who preceded him, he hoped to find some hints on how to hold himself together; so the last chapter of the thesis would indeed be built upon the mistakes of the previous ten. History as shrink.

What troubled him most, in the final year of the 1980s, were his self-doubts. Though he was a handsome man, wiry, with long legs and blue eyes that lit his face, he did not swagger with the confidence of those who know they are good-looking. He walked as if on ice. Though he was a generous man, using his precious free time to help somebody fix a septic tank or fight a bureaucratic edict in a county where the federal government owned most of the land, he was always afraid that he was being used or set up. Though he was a smart man, able to juggle three thoughts at once, to make leaps of logic that impressed his prosecutors and his professors, he could not shake the recurring image he had of himself as a rube, the kid in hand-me-down clothes who flunked his senior year in high school.

H
E WAS
a tiny boy when his mother left him and moved to Hawaii with a musician and his father was sent to jail. He remembered the strange men who used to come to the house in Wallace, Idaho, when Louis Bamonte was off working in the mines. Tony was born in Wallace in 1942—in the same hospital where a miner’s wife gave birth to Lana Turner. He lived his first years in a town with two dozen whorehouses, set in a valley where more silver was yanked from the ground than in any other place on earth. The skies were ever dark with factory smoke, and the streets were thick with coal dust. Only when the wind was blowing could the top of a six-hundred-foot smelter smokestack be seen. They called the Coeur d’Alene River drainage on the western side of the Bitterroots the Silver Valley, but its dominant color was a gray that covered faces and streets and houses and trees. In the afternoons, Lucille Bamonte baked cakes, and when Tony asked for bites, she shooed him away. The goodies were not for Tony and his brother and sister but for the men who came to visit
their mother. A honey blonde with blue eyes, Lucille was considered by some men to be the prettiest woman in the panhandle of northern Idaho. In a valley where smelter toxins killed all the nearby forests and poisoned the river, and a haze of poison air hung over the drafty company shacks, a beauty such as Lucille Bamonte stood out like a rose in pavement. Deep inside the mine shafts, air vents often failed or supports crumbled. Because death was common, Silver Valley miners’ jobs were sometimes more like combat than earning a living.

Tony saw strangers come through the small house in the dirty mining town, eat his mother’s cakes, and then go off into a bedroom. When he was six, after the family moved sixty miles west to Spokane, his father came home early on Christmas Eve and caught his mother with a musician, a man who was not coarse or crude like the filthy miners. Tony was a skinny string of a boy—no more than forty pounds. Frightened by his father’s rage, he scrambled under a bed and watched him savagely beat the man.

The police arrived and found the musician unconscious. One of the officers knelt down next to the bed, coaxed the scared little boy out from under it, and hugged him. Tony never forgot the two giants in blue with their guns and badges, angels in uniform. Both parents were taken to jail. His father was booked for felony assault; his mother was held on vagrancy charges, the catch-all crime of the Spokane Police Department. The three children spent Christmas morning with the two policemen.

Louis Bamonte had come to America from Italy and was alone in New York at an early age after both of his parents died. One of six children, he had spent most of his childhood homeless in the Bronx. Nicknamed “Bull,” the dark-haired Bamonte could swing an axe or wield a mining pick with ferocity. He also read poetry aloud, practiced ballroom dancing, and insisted that his children go to Catholic mass. On Sundays, even when he lived in a tent near a logging camp, he put on a suit and read or composed verse. He was not a heavy drinker, like so many of the miners and timber beasts of the inland Northwest, but he had a temper. If the police had not come on Christmas Eve, Bull Bamonte would have killed the man he found with his wife.

Shortly after the Christmas fight, Lucille Bamonte fled to Hawaii
with her lover. Tony did not see his mother for two years. He hated her for what she had done, breaking the family up, treating the children like they didn’t matter, forcing his father to jail. For a while, he lived with his maternal grandfather, but then he died. With the three closest people in his life gone—his father in jail, his mother in the Pacific, his grandfather dead—the boy retreated into his inner self, trying to escape the closed and frightened world where adults beat each other up and were always leaving each other. Every time somebody turned to exit, he thought, could be the last.

Once out of jail, Bull Bamonte took the kids to a logging camp in the northern part of Pend Oreille County, one of the last truly wild areas in the American West. Red cedar, Douglas fir, tamarack, and ponderosa pine all grew to great heights in the Selkirk Mountains. The elevation was high enough to knock down the clouds and squeeze out sufficient rainfall, so the forest was more like that of the western Cascades than the drier pine woods of eastern Washington.

Tony slept on a straw mat on the floor of a tent. At night he listened to the labored breathing of his father as he coughed up the accumulated residue from years in the Silver Valley. But as long as the boy could hear his father’s chest heaving in and out, he was happy—it meant that Bull was alive. Most mornings, he would not let his father go off to work without him; while he should have been in school Tony insisted on following Bull to the logging camps in the woods. The willowy kid became the shadow of Bull, the tree-cutting machine, a man who worked twelve and fourteen hours a day, logging and skinning small cedars in the mountains around Metaline Falls. Bull’s dream was to save enough money to buy his own small mine, and then he hoped to strike it rich in this land where the rivers carried gold nuggets downstream, and the rock walls glistened with galena.

After several months in the tent, the family moved into a one-room cabin, two hundred square feet, with three windows. Tony slept on an old service cot with “United States Army” stamped on the side. There was no running water or electricity inside the cabin, but it sat beside a creek that was full of trout and attracted deer. Food was never any farther than the wild game outside the cabin door; his father killed a deer every six weeks or so. But Tony grew to hate the
taste of venison. Even now, he cannot go near deer meat without thinking of the time spent inside the one-room cabin. In the depths of winter, they moved into an abandoned dance hall, the Red Rooster, a few miles north of Metaline Falls. The old beer hall, which had roared with timber workers and their women during Prohibition, had been silent for a number of years. The stench of alcohol remained, and the walls were pockmarked from the shrapnel of bar fights. But for a seven-year-old boy, it was a mansion, an indoor frontier. The Bamontes set up their home on the hardwood dance floor and cooked meals on the giant wood stove. One of Tony’s jobs was to make sure the fire never went out.