Swan Peak

by James Lee Burke

  “Hello,” she said.

  “Hey, hon,” he replied.

  “Where are you?”

  “Up on the Blackfeet res. I can see Canada from here. Where are you?”

  “In the garden. Leslie is looking down at me from the window. I’ll call you back in five minutes.” She clicked off.

  He left his duffel and rolled sleeping bag by the phone booth and went inside the filling station and bought a soft drink. He drank it outside by the booth, the wind blowing hot across the fields. To the west, past the undulating golden plains that had once been carpeted by buffalo, he could see the translucent smoky-blue outline of the northern Rockies and the eastern boundary of Glacier National Park. The phone rang inside the booth. His heart was beating when he picked up the receiver. “Hello,” he said.

  “I’m on the other side of the stable. Leslie can’t see me. But I can’t talk long,” she said.

  He told her where he was and described how she could get there, how to skirt the southeast corner of Glacier and to cross the Continental Divide at Marias Pass and to keep going through Blackfeet country all the way to the Milk River. He felt as though his words were actually creating her and Dale’s journey, drawing them closer as he spoke.

  But she wasn’t hearing him. “Listen to me, Jimmy Dale!” she said. “I can’t drive up there. I don’t have a car. Leslie watches me all the time. There’s another way.”

  “No, just get out of there.”

  “You know how you ended up in jail? You don’t listen to anybody. With you, it’s always full throttle and fuck it, no matter who gets hurt.”

  He felt his hand squeeze tight on the receiver. He had left the door to the phone booth open, and he could hear the wind blowing through the ocean of dry grass that surrounded him. He cleared his throat.

  “Are you still there?” she asked.

  “Yeah, I’m here,” he replied. “I’m definitely way-to-hell-and-gone up here.”

  She ignored the implication. “A man is going to help us. I’m buying a used Toyota. He’ll drop it in Arlee with the keys under the fender. There’ll be money and a cell phone in the dash compartment. The car should be ready tomorrow.”

  “I don’t want Leslie Wellstone’s car, and I don’t want his money, either.”

  “It’s not Leslie’s. I’m buying it with my money. You get rid of that stubborn attitude, Jimmy Dale.”

  He pressed the heel of his hand against his forehead and realized he was rubbing her cell number off his skin.

  “What’s wrong?” she said.

  “Everything. I thought you and me and little Dale was gonna be together today. I thought we’d be highballing up into Alberta. I know people who can take us across on a dirt road with no customs check. I thought we’d go plumb to Calgary.”

  “We will. We just got to do it right. You don’t know what Leslie and Ridley are like. They own people. They suck the life out of them.”

  He took the ballpoint from his shirt pocket and, pressing the phone receiver against his ear with his shoulder, tore a piece of paper loose from the phone directory and wrote out her cell number on it. Then he thumbed the piece of paper into his watch pocket. “I keep thinking we’re gonna get blown away in the wind, like leaves that go bouncing across a field. It’s the feeling I had in prison. That no matter what I tried to do, I was gonna be buried alive and wouldn’t ever see y’all again. You never come to visit me, Jamie Sue.”

  “I couldn’t. But I’m going to make up for that,” she said.

  He wanted to believe her. He wanted to believe her real bad. In the silence, a cluster of newspaper scudded across the concrete and broke apart in the air. He watched the pages lift above an irrigation ditch and float like broken wings inside a dust devil. “How’s little Dale?” he asked.

  “He’s wonderful. You’re going to love him.”

  “I already do.”

  “I know that, Jimmy Dale.”

  “Who’s this guy helping out with the car?”

  “He just started driving for me. But I knew him from before. He’d do anything for me.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Harold Waxman, the daytime bartender at the nightclub on the lake,” she replied.

  AFTER CLETE AND I left the Wellstone compound, we drove down to the edge of Swan Lake and parked in a grove of cottonwoods. We ate some sandwiches and drank soda that Clete had put in his ice chest. I had started the trip up to the Wellstone manor with a sense of optimism, but my spirits had begun to sink, and I wondered if we would ever find the people who had killed the two college students, Cindy Kershaw and Seymour Bell, or the sadist who had tried to burn Clete alive.

  The soda had been in the cooler for days and was ice-cold and for some reason made me think of fishing trips with my father during the 1940s. Clete got out of the Caddy and walked farther down the shore and began skipping stones across the water. It was breezy and warm inside the trees, and I reclined the leather seat and thought I would rest my eyes for a few moments. In seconds I was fast asleep, and I had one of those daytime dreams that tell you more about your life than you wish to learn.

  I thought the images were from a tropical forest in a Southeast Asian country. Mist hung in the trees, and the ground was white or gray with compacted layers of winter-killed leaves. Air vines hung in the columns of tea-colored light that penetrated the canopy. But the backdrop for the dream was not Vietnam; it was the Louisiana of my youth. The trees were all old growth, the trunks as hard as iron, the roots as big as a man’s torso, gnarled and brown and bursting through the earth. In the midst of the forest was a clearing, and inside the clearing was a freshly dug grave. An M16 rifle with an unsheathed bayonet affixed to the muzzle had been upended and driven solidly into the mound above the grave. A steel pot had been balanced atop the rifle butt, with a chain and a set of dog tags draped around the circumference. The cloth cover was rotted, blowing in cottony wisps, the inked turkey-track peace symbol barely visible. I could hear the dog tags tinkling in the breeze and see the soldier’s name and serial number stamped into the metal. I felt my mouth go dry and my heart expand to the size of a small pumpkin.

  I woke up suddenly, unsure where I was. Clete was standing on the lakeshore, a smile on his face, a flat red stone poised in his hand. “Come throw a few with me,” he said.

  “Throw what?” I said, my eyes blinking at the glare on the water out beyond the shade of the cottonwoods.

  “Stones. I’m heck on pike.”

  “Sure,” I said, getting out of the Caddy, my mind still inside the dream.

  “You nod off for a while?”

  “I saw a marker left by the graves detail. Except it was in Louisiana, not ’Nam. My tags were wrapped around my steel pot.”

  He let the stone drop from his hand onto the bank. He walked up the slope and fitted his big hand around the back of his neck. I could smell the piece of peppermint candy in his jaw. I could see the texture in his facial skin and the lidless intensity of his green eyes. I could also see pity and love in them, and the terrible knowledge that for some situations there are no words that can help, no anodyne that will make facing our greatest ordeal less than it is.

  I rubbed the back of my wrist against my mouth. I knew at that moment I would have swallowed a razor blade for four fingers of Jack on cracked ice, and that realization filled me with shame. When I saw a caravan coming through the trees, I was glad for the danger it represented.

  CHAPTER 25

  CLETE PURCEL HAD descended from a Celtic ancestry that was more pagan than Christian. His forebears had ridden the coffin ships in the 1840s and had been reviled by Nativists and consigned to urban sewers like Five Points in New York and the Irish Channel in New Orleans. Arguably, they had been treated as subhuman. The upshot was they developed the ethos of people like Clete, whose admonition in dealing with skells and other people who give you trouble was always the same: “Dust ’em or bust ’em, noble mon” or “Take it to them with tongs.”

  May
be that isn’t a bad way to go. But sometimes when you disengage from your adversaries and isolate them and leave them to deal with their own hostilities and fears, sealing the worst elements in their personalities inside their skins, with no form of release, you condemn them to a nongeographical form of solitary confinement that is like steel blades whirling inside the viscera. Better yet, sometimes you accomplish this without even trying.

  Three waxed and buffed new vehicles came down the winding access road through the trees and stopped up the slope from where Clete and I stood on the water’s edge. The sun was in the west, the sky ribbed with blue-black clouds that gave no offer of rain, and shadows had pooled on the front windshields of the three vehicles so we couldn’t see inside them. The moment reminded me of Clete’s original encounter with the Wellstones’ minions.

  The vehicle in the lead was a black Mercedes. Lyle Hobbs opened the back door for Leslie Wellstone. When Wellstone stepped out on the edge of the beach, the windows of the other two vehicles rolled down on their electric motors. I could see the humped shapes of men inside, all of them watching us, two or three of them wearing shades although the vehicles were parked in shadow.

  “You got your piece?” Clete said.

  “Nope,” I said.

  Leslie Wellstone approached us, a flash of white teeth showing at the corner of his mouth, his eyes never quite resting on ours, as though he wished to be deferential and courteous. “On a fishing trip, are we?” he said.

  “It’s the place for it,” I said.

  “Mr. Hobbs said you wanted to see me.”

  “Mr. Hobbs told us to beat it,” I said.

  “The door is always open for you gentlemen. Particularly for Mr. Purcel,” Wellstone said.

  “Let’s get something straight, Jack,” Clete said. “I got on your marital turf. I’m sorry that happened. But it’s on me, not on your wife, not on Dave here. So fuck me. If you got issues with that, let’s get it out on the table now.”

  “You’re a direct man,” Wellstone said.

  “I get that way when a psychopath soaks me in gasoline,” Clete said.

  “I see. But you didn’t get to have the complete experience, did you? Did you know that at a certain point your sensory system dumps into your blood and your nerve endings go dead? You feel as though you’re inside a blue tongue of flame that gives no heat.”

  Clete cupped his hands on his lighter and lit a cigarette. I took the cigarette from his mouth and threw it in the water. Wellstone watched this as though he were a spectator at a Guignol.

  “Somebody locked you down in an oven and cooked you alive,” Clete said. “But sometimes that happens when you join the shake-and-bake brigade. Most of the original members in my platoon didn’t come back, at least not with all their parts. Most of the ones who came home wake up every day with their heads in the Mixmaster. So how about getting off other people’s backs?”

  The rise in the pitch of Clete’s voice caused two of Wellstone’s employees to step out of their vehicles.

  “Mr. Wellstone, we didn’t ask to get involved in your family’s business affairs or your personal lives,” I said. “You brought the trouble to us. In the meantime, two college kids died terrible deaths. I think your house is about to come down on your head. But Clete and I didn’t do it to you. Quince Whitley was a federal informant. I suspect he screwed you good with the feds before he cashed in.”

  I could see the attention grow in Wellstone’s eyes. “Who was Whitley’s best friend?” I asked. “None other than Mr. Hobbs over there. You taking good care of Mr. Hobbs?”

  “Questioning the altruism of my employees, are you?” Wellstone said.

  “No, I’m questioning the loyalty of everybody around you, including your wife,” I said. “How about Sonny Click, man of the cloth that he was? Guys like Click don’t bounce themselves off a rafter. I think he was about to do some serious damage to your reputation, and he got taken off the board. I think it’s got something to do with sex.”

  “You have a nasty tongue on you, Mr. Robicheaux,” Wellstone said.

  Clete just had to do it. “We also know your entourage of gumballs here isn’t entirely about us,” he said. “You think Jimmy Dale Greenwood is out there climbing your old lady. If that’s true, it’s because you made her life purely awful. I think you’ve got the same problem I have, Mr. Wellstone. It’s called the reverse King Midas touch. Everything we put our hands on turns to shit.”

  Leslie Wellstone stepped closer to me. I could feel his breath on my skin and smell an odor, perhaps imagined, perhaps not, that was like the afterburn of kerosene. His eyes stared like a lizard’s out of his encrusted face. They were liquid, as though fluid from a systemic malignancy had pooled inside them. His voice became a hiss. “You read Shakespeare, Mr. Robicheaux? The Prince of Darkness is a gentleman. But don’t underestimate his power.”

  Involuntarily I stepped back from him, the lip of the lake touching my shoe.

  He turned and walked away, his men falling in beside him.

  “Keep your wick dry, Sally,” Clete said at his back.

  But if Leslie Wellstone was Sally Dio, he didn’t take the bait. Instead, he kept walking toward his Mercedes, his gaze lifted to the hooded blue jays in the tree branches overhead.

  Then I gave it a try. “Comment va votre famille à Galveston?”

  This time Wellstone turned around. “Bien, merci,” he replied.

  Got you, motherfucker, I thought.

  But Leslie Wellstone wasn’t one to be easily undone. “We have relatives in Galveston, Mr. Robicheaux. I’m sure that’s whom you were referring to,” he said.

  WE DROVE BACK to Albert’s ranch, west of Lolo, and I made another call to Sheriff Helen Soileau, my boss down in New Iberia. “I think some heavy stuff is about to go down here,” I said.

  “Why now?”

  “This escaped convict, Jimmy Dale Greenwood, is probably planning to run off with Leslie Wellstone’s wife.”

  “What do you need?” she said, barely able to hide the fatigue in her voice.

  “We’re looking at four open homicide cases and one questionable suicide,” I replied. “I think they’re all related, but I can’t fit one net over all five of them. I think the motivation has to do with sex, but I’m not sure.”

  “Money buys sex. It also buys power. I’d follow the money, Streak.”

  “That’s why I’m calling. You remember when you gave me the background on the murder of Ridley Wellstone’s ex-wife and stepdaughter? You said the Harris County Sheriff’s Office and Houston PD thought the target might have been the stepdaughter rather than the wife, because the daughter had dropped the dime on an Australian porn actor after she got pinched holding a brick of marijuana.”

  “You have to forgive me if the details are a little vague,” she said.

  “One of the homicide victims up here was a porn film producer from Malibu. Maybe it’s just coincidence.”

  “Could be,” she said.

  I couldn’t blame her for her level of response. She had enough to do in the post-Katrina, post-Rita world of southern Louisiana, a place that had once been an almost Edenic paradise. Now I was calling from thousands of miles away and, like the obsessed man railing in sackcloth, expecting others to rally to my cause.

  “Run a guy by the name of Harold Waxman for me,” I said. “He’s a bartender and a seasonal truck driver.”

  “You’re calling him a person of interest?”

  “I don’t know what he is. Maybe he’s just a bartender and part-time truck driver. None of this stuff makes any sense. Remember the name of Sally Dio?”

  “From Galveston?”

  “There’s a possibility he’s still alive and posing as Leslie Wellstone. I asked him in French how his family in Galveston was doing. He said fine, in French, but maybe he didn’t hear the entirety of my question.”

  Whatever degree of interest she’d had was now totally gone. “How’s Clete?” she asked.

  “He says he mig
ht move to California.”

  “Right,” she replied.

  That was the best statement I’d heard all day.

  THAT EVENING JIMMY Dale Greenwood camped in a grove of pine trees on Flathead Lake. He created a tent by tying a cord between two tree trunks and hanging his poncho over it, then he spread his sleeping bag under the poncho and started a fire inside a ring of stones he had gathered from the water’s edge. When the fire was hot and had begun to crumble into ash, flaring with even greater heat under the blackened logs, he opened a can of pork and beans and set it to bubbling on a flat stone. Then he made two cheese sandwiches and toasted them inside a sheet of foil that he curled up on the sides. While his food cooked, he drank a soda and watched the sun burn into a spark on the far side of the lake.

  Down the beach, someone was playing a guitar. Jimmy Dale rested his head on his duffel bag and could feel the stiff outline of the Remington pump inside the cloth.

  Tomorrow would be the day that decided the rest of his life, he thought. He could say in all honesty he did not fear death. Once born, you were already inside eternity, not preparing for it. Existence was a deep pasture that had no fence across it. Jimmy Dale’s grandfather, who had been a shaman, had said that embarking upon the Ghost Trail was not a passage as much as a sharpening of his vision. Unfortunately, being unafraid of death was not the same as being brave.

  If you were indeed brave, you had to face your greatest fear and overcome it. Jimmy Dale had no doubt what his greatest fear was. But he was not going back to prison to overcome it. If others wished to be buried under concrete and steel to demonstrate their spiritual courage, they could have at it.

  The first stars were twinkling in the sky. If he died tomorrow, he died tomorrow, and to hell with the white man’s jail. Perhaps death was nothing more than drifting like ash among the stars, or living inside the rain and wind, or being part of a celestial being that could never be locked inside a cage.

  Chief Joseph, before he was sent in chains to Oklahoma, said, “I will be where I am.” You just have to remember words like those, Jimmy Dale told himself.