Swan Peak (28 page)

“You’re an unbelievable person. You have more arrests than most recidivists do. You dropped a Teamster out of a hotel window into a dry swimming pool. You actually shot and killed a federal informant and got away with it.”

“I was having a bad day when those things happened.”

“Maybe it’s time to lose the Bozo the Clown routine. I’d like to help you. But frankly, you act like an idiot.”

Clete felt himself swallow. “Was your dad a GI?”

“None of your business.”

“I was in the Central Highlands. That’s where I got wounded and sent home. That’s the only reason I asked. I thought Vietnam was a beautiful country. I thought what happened there was a tragedy.”

She crimped her lips together and looked down at her lap. “My father was a marine. He was captured by the Vietcong and held seven weeks before he escaped. He killed himself when I was twelve.”

“Sorry.”

“What were we talking about, Mr. Purcel?”

“I don’t know. The shitbag who sapped me.”

“Yes, the shitbag.”

“You don’t connect him with the Wellstone entourage?”

“I can’t concentrate now,” she said.

“Once before, you said his MO was like a guy or guys operating along the interstates.”

“A rest stop coming off Wolf Creek Pass, a campground at Donner Pass. Some other places, too. Where did you say you were in Vietnam?”

“I got my second Heart in the Central Highlands. But I was in Force Recon and on the Cambodian border, too. We were picking up LURPs who’d gone into Cambodia, except nobody has ever admitted they were in Cambodia. What was your old man’s name?”

“Joe Rosecrans.”

“No, I don’t think I knew him. You want some coffee?”

She didn’t answer.

“Look, Dave says I got the finesse of a junkyard falling down a staircase,” Clete said. “I didn’t mean to knock your organization. I’m just not totally comfortable with guys who smell like mouthwash. You ever been around undertakers? Every one of them smells like he just gargled with Listerine.”

“I have to go.”

“Don’t,” he said.

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because you’re different.”

“Mr. Purcel, you’re the most inept, outrageous person I’ve ever met.”

“It’s part of my rationality deficit disorder. It’s called RDD. There’s a lot of it going around. I’ll fix some eats for us. Then we can take a drive up to Lolo Peak. There’s still snow back in the trees. We can talk about the dude who almost lit me up.”

“Your rationality deficit disorder?RDD?”

“My shrink is a pioneer in the field,” he said.

“Goodbye. I’ll call you when we develop more information.”

He tried to hide his disappointment. “Yeah, anytime,” he said. “Tell the guys you work with I’m not the problem in their lives.”

From the window, he watched her get in her car and back it around and head down the driveway and under the arch. He watched her drive down the road along the rail fence while Albert’s Foxtrotters raced beside her in the pasture. He watched her reach the south end of Albert’s ranch, marked by a grove of cottonwood trees. He watched her car disappear inside the leafy shade of the grove, the leaves flickering like thousands of green butterflies in the breeze. Then, a moment later, he saw the car reemerge, pointed back toward the house. He watched it coming up the road, the horses, all colts, running with it. He watched the car slow, the turn indicator blinking, although no other vehicles were on the road. He watched it turn under the arch and come up the driveway and stop by the garage, beyond his line of vision. He heard the driver’s door open and slam shut.

She came down the flagstone steps to his door and arrived just as he was opening it, his mouth agape.

“I left my ballpoint,” she said.

“Oh.”

“My roommate at Quantico gave it to me.”

“Yeah, I can relate to that.”

She opened her eyes wide and blew out her breath. “You up for this, chief?” she asked.

For Clete, the next few moments could be described only in terms of skyrockets bursting in the heavens or the Marine Corps band blaring out “From the Halls of Montezuma” or, on a less dramatic level, his morning angst dissolving into the sound of a lawn sprinkler fanning against his bedroom window, the smell of flowers opening in a damp garden, the throaty rush of wind in the trees, or perhaps an Asian mermaid swimming through a rainbow that arched across the entirety of the landscape.

CHAPTER 15

THAT SAME MORNING
I went to the post office to pick up our mail, then into Missoula to buy new tires for my pickup. On the way back, I stopped at the cabin where J. D. Gribble lived, just over the mountain from Albert’s house. I had been there twice since Gribble had woken up in the back of Albert’s truck and had seen the man in the mask pouring gasoline on Clete Purcel. In both instances, Gribble had not been home or anywhere on the property that I could see. This time, when I parked my pickup by his cabin, I heard music, first the tail end of “Cimarron” and then “Madison Blues.”

Gribble’s door was open, and I could see him sitting in a straight-back chair, three steel picks on his right hand, a Dobro stretched across his lap. The Dobro was inset with a chrome-plated resonator, and Gribble was accompanying his chord progressions with a kazoo that he blew like a saxophone, leaning into it, totally absorbed inside his music, one booted foot patting up and down on the plank floor. His face jerked when he saw me, and he lifted the steel picks from the strings.

“Not many guys can do both Bob Wills and Elmore James,” I said.

“It was Leon McAuliffe that was the big influence. White or black, they all got their styles from him, no matter what they claim,” he said.

“I wanted to thank you for saving Clete’s life. I came up here yesterday but didn’t see you around.”

“A cougar or a bear busted the wire on the back fence, and some of the horses wandered up the hill. That deal concerning Mr. Purcel is something I’d rather not revisit.”

“Why’s that?”

“’Cause it scared the hell out of me. That FBI woman has done talked it to death, anyway. I don’t know who that guy in the mask was, and I ain’t interested in finding out. I’d just like to get shut of the whole business.”

He set the Dobro on his table and looked around, as though his exasperation were a means to confront spirits or voices that hung on the edges of his vision.

“What I’m trying to tell you is Clete and I are in your debt. You need a favor or help of some kind, we’re your guys,” I said.

He sucked in his cheeks and stared into space. “Mr. Purcel said you was in Vietnam.”

“A few months.”

“You come back with some spiders in your head?”

“A couple.”

“You spend a whole lot of time talking about it with other people?”

“No.”

“How come?”

“Because it’s not something they care to hear about or would understand.”

The sun had gone behind clouds, and it was dark and cool inside the cabin. Gribble pulled the steel picks from his fingers and dropped them in a tobacco can. He wore a denim shirt buttoned at the wrists. He brushed at his nose with his shirt cuff, his gaze turned inward. He waited a long time before he spoke. His manner, his mind-set, the opaqueness of his expression made me think of hill people I had known, or company-town millworkers, or people who did stoop labor or bucked bales or worked for decades at jobs in which a certain meanness of spirit allowed them to survive.

“I come out here to be let alone,” he said. “That’s all I ever wanted. That and my music and a woman I used to love and our Airstream trailer and the life of a rodeo man. You reckon that’s a lot to ask?”

Not seventy-five years ago, it wouldn’t have been
, I thought. But I kept my own counsel. “How much does a Dobro like that cost?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” he replied, drumming the pads of his fingers on the tabletop. When I didn’t speak, he shifted his eyes onto mine. “Something else?”

“Yeah. Can you play ‘Cimarron’ again?”

MOLLY WAS SPRINKLING
the flowers in the window boxes with a watering can when I got back to our cabin. To the south, rain was falling in the valley, and in the sunlight it looked like spun glass on the trees that grew along the slopes. “I just tried to thank J. D. Gribble for saving Clete’s life. He wasn’t interested,” I said.

“Maybe he’s a humble man,” she said.

“He owns an antique Dobro. It must be worth thousands of dollars. You ought to hear him sing. His voice is beautiful. Why’s a guy like that shoveling horse flop in Lolo, Montana?”

“Did you see Clete?” she asked, changing the subject.

“No, why?”

“I just wondered,” she said.

I waited. She moved the watering can back and forth over the pansies in the window boxes, her face empty.

“What’s he done now?” I asked.

“I didn’t say he’d done anything. Besides, it’s time to stop micromanaging his life, Dave.”

“Will you stop this?”

“That FBI woman was there. She left and then came back. His secretary in New Orleans couldn’t reach him, so she called me on my cell. I went down to his apartment. No answer to the knock. Nobody in the living room or the kitchenette. As quietly as possible, I walked back here and didn’t look over my shoulder. Later, the two of them drove off in her car. Is that detailed enough?”

“You’re kidding?”

“It’s his life. We need to butt out, troop.”

“In the sack with the FBI?While she’s on duty? I can’t believe it.”

“Remind me not to have this type of conversation with you again,” she said.

But Molly didn’t get it. The problem wasn’t Clete’s romantic entanglement with a federal agent; the problem was the long-dormant investigation into the plane crash that had killed Sally Dio and his fellow lowlifes. In the eyes of some, Clete was still a suspect, and he had just managed to swim back onto the radar in the most annoying fashion he could think up.

“
What
?” she said, setting down the watering can on the porch. She was wearing a sundress, and in the shade, her freckled skin had a pale, powdery luminescence that made my heart quicken.

I smiled at her. “Clete is just Clete, isn’t he?” I said.

“Dave, you’re so crazy,” she replied.

I went inside and put on a pair of gym shorts, my running shoes, and a T-shirt, then jogged down the road toward the highway. The sun shower had stopped and the air smelled cool and fresh, like mowed hay. A family of wild turkeys was drinking from the horse tank in Albert’s pasture, the male and female fluttering up on the aluminum rim with their chicks, the horses watching the show.

I hit it hard for half a mile, running through the dappled shade of cottonwoods, chipmunks skittering in the rocks up on the hillside, the great hulking presence of Lolo Peak rising into the sky by the Idaho line. It was a grand morning, the kind that makes you feel you shouldn’t look beyond the day you have, that it’s enough simply to be at work and play in the fields of the Lord. But I could not rid myself of my worries about Clete Purcel, nor could I stop thinking about the ordeal he had suffered on the mountainside Saturday night down in the Bitterroots.

Who was the culprit? God only knew. I’ve known sadists, sexual predators, and serial killers of every stripe. In my opinion, no matter what behavioral psychologists say, none of them fits a profile with any appreciable degree of exactitude or predictability. Searching their backgrounds for environmental explanations is a waste of time. Deprivation, abuse in the home, and alcoholism and drug addiction in the family may be factors, but they’re not the cause. Turn the situation around. In the Western world, who were the worst monsters of the twentieth century? Who tortured with glee and murdered with indifference? Stalin was an ex-seminarian. The people who fired the ovens in Auschwitz were baptized Christians.

The truth is, no one knows what makes psychopaths. They don’t share their secrets. Nor do they ever confess their crimes in their entirety, lest the confessions rob them of their deeds and the power over others those deeds have given them.

I had no doubt the man in the mask was out there, biding his time, waiting to catch Clete in an unguarded moment or vulnerable situation. Sadists and serial killers feed on trust and naïveté and do not like to be undone by their adversaries. As long as Clete remained alive, he would represent failure to the man who had tried to burn him to death.

I rounded a bend in the road and slowed to a walk in the shade of cottonwoods, my skin cool and glazed with sweat, my heart steady, my breath coming easy in my lungs. The wind was ruffling through the canopy, the sky an immaculate translucent blue, as bright and flawless as silk. I didn’t want to think any more about serial killers, about violent men and cupidity and the manipulation for political ends of uneducated and poor people whose religion was expropriated and used to hurt them. I only wanted to disconnect from the world as it is, or at least as I have come to know it.

Just when I had convinced myself that it was possible to live inside the moment, that neither the past nor the future should be allowed to lay claim to it, I saw an SUV headed toward me, a tall man in a pearl-gray western hat in the passenger seat, a woman driving.

The woman lifted a hand in recognition as they passed, then continued up the road and turned in to Albert’s driveway. The man wore a grin at the corner of his mouth, a bit like John Wayne.

ALBERT HOLLISTER KEPT
his office on the main floor of his home, with a view that looked out on his barn and northern pasture and an arroyo behind the house. His bookshelves extended from the floor to the ceiling. The shelves by his writing desk were littered with Indian arrowheads and pottery shards, fifty-eight-caliber minié balls, a milk-glass doorknob from the bathroom of Boss Tweed, switchblade and trench knives, a tomahawk, nineteenth-century telegraph transformers, an IWW button, goatskin wine bags from Pamplona, and a deactivated World War II hand grenade. The office also contained a glass case for his published books and short stories and another case for his guns, which included an M16, a twelve-gauge pump, an ’03 Springfield, a ’94 lever-action Winchester, and a half-dozen sidearms.