Swan Peak (34 page)

“This is gonna take all night. I’ll get a pitcher from the bar and order direct from next door,” he said, getting up from his chair. “Don’t run off with no movie stars.”

“What movie stars?” she said, looking up at him.

“Look yonder at the end of the bar.”

A man with rugged good looks was buying a round for a half-dozen people who were gathered around him, much like candle moths hovering around a flame inside a glass chimney.

“He’s in that new western,” Candace said.

“And he was looking at you, darlin’. Tell him you’re taken.”

“That’s silly,” she said.

But after Troyce left, she realized the actor
was
looking at her with a faint smile while he pretended to listen to the conversation going on around him. He set his glass down and approached her table. She studied the tops of her hands. When she looked up again the actor was standing two feet from her, his fingers resting on the back of Troyce’s empty chair.

“I wondered if you and your friend would like to join us,” he said.

“We just ordered dinner,” she replied.

“After you eat, come over to the bar for a drink.”

He was of medium height but extremely handsome in the way that some men can be handsome without trying, his dark hair freshly barbered, his skin clear, his dress shirt and gray slacks loose on his athletic frame.

“Thank you, but we just came here to eat.” She glanced toward the doorway that led into the truck stop. “We’re probably not staying long.”

“You ought to. They got a great band. There’s a guy sitting in with them who’s really good.”

“Thanks for the invitation. We’re just going to eat.”

“You ever do any film work?”

“No. I don’t know anything about it.”

“I’d like to talk to you about it. Your friend, too. He’s got an unusual face. Was he in an accident of some kind?”

“I’m a cook. Listen, I love your movies, but you’re talking to the wrong person.” She tried to smile. She looked toward the entrance to the truck stop again. “I think my friend is coming back with our food.”

“It’s nice meeting you,” the actor said. “What’s your name?”

“It’s Candace. Excuse me, I got to go to the restroom.”

“Where do you live?”

“In a motel up the road. No, I’m kidding. Troyce and me own half of Beverly Hills. We eat in dumps like this for kicks.”

“If you change your mind, Candace, we’ll be at the bar. I’m not hitting on you. I meant what I said.”

When Candace returned from the restroom, her heart was still pounding. Troyce was sitting at the table, a foaming pitcher and two glasses in front of him.

“I was right, wasn’t I?” he said.

“About what?”

“That guy had his eye on you.”

“He wanted to invite us for a drink. He said maybe both of us could work in films. I think he was just being a nice guy, that’s all.”

“Yeah?” he said, grinning. “What’d you tell him?”

“That we were having dinner. You’re not gonna do anything, are you?”

“You know better than that,” he said playfully. “I ordered your steak medium well done, with a baked potato and double melted butter and a salad with buttermilk dressing. That’s what you wanted, right?”

But she realized she
didn’t
know better than that. In his dreams, Troyce traveled to places she could never enter, and he saw things and heard sounds inside closed rooms that she refused to let herself think about. When she watched the news about a distant war where American soldiers trudged through biscuit-colored villages blown with flies and garbage, she tried to imagine Troyce as one of them, brave, uncomplaining, his uniform stiff with salt, his skin gray with dust, like a Roman legionnaire coming out of a sandstorm. But all she could think of was Troyce in a closed room while a man with a towel wrapped around his face was being drowned.

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the actor take a mixed drink from the bartender and place it in the hand of a windburned, dark-featured man who wore jeans and a denim jacket and whose unshaved face was the same as that of the man in the jailhouse photo that Troyce carried in his billfold. Her beer glass trembled in her hand.

“That fellow eyeballing you again?” Troyce said.

“No,” she said, taking his wrist, keeping his eyes on hers. “Troyce, let’s go over to the Cascades. We can stop for the night in Coeur d’Alene and go on in the morning. I’ll show you the place where we can start up our café. We can have a good life there.”

“I declare if you’re not a puzzle,” he replied.

WITHOUT TROYCE NIX’S
ever noticing, a diesel-powered fire-engine-red pickup truck with oversize tires and headlights that sparkled had followed him from the motel to the club. Now the driver of the pickup sat in the cab in the parking lot, gazing through the windshield at the front of the club, wondering about his next move. The driver was wearing neatly pressed navy blue work pants and a wide belt with a big chrome buckle and a magenta shirt that changed colors in the light. He also wore a black vest, with a silk back, like a nineteenth-century gunfighter or a riverboat gambler might wear. He had shaved and gotten a haircut that afternoon and had showered and washed his hair. He had put on a Resistol hat and a new pair of Acme pointy-toed boots. Looking at himself in the mirror before he left his garage apartment on the Wellstone estate, he hardly recognized his reflection. He had drawn all his money out of the bank and had put eight one-hundred-dollar bills in his wallet, clipped by a chain onto his belt. He had also dropped a clasp knife with a hooked blade for cutting thick twine into his trouser pocket.

Somehow, in surrendering himself to the deeds he was about to commit, Quince Whitley had discovered he possessed a persona he had never thought would be his, namely that of a Mississippi farm boy who had become the debonair scourge of God. That thought caused a surge in his blood that was like his first time with a black girl, way back when it was exciting, back before he stopped keeping count.

“Getting your ashes hauled tonight?” Lyle Hobbs had asked him.

Quince had just finished combing his hair. He blew the dandruff out of the comb’s leather case and slipped the comb inside. “That’s one way to put it. Except the lady doesn’t necessarily know what’s on her dance card yet,” Quince had said.

In the silence, Lyle had seemed to look at Quince in a different light.

Now Quince sat tapping his hands on the steering wheel, staring whimsically at the split-log facade of the club and the strings of tiny white lights that framed the windows and the dark shadow of the mountain that lifted into the sky just beyond the rear of the building. He could hear the music of a country band, a clatter of dishware, and a balloon of voices when a door opened and closed. He could play the situation several ways, but he knew Quince Whitley’s time had come around at last, and all the people who had hurt him, including that burned freak and his wife up at Swan Lake, were going to get their buckwheats. You just don’t dump on a Whitley, bubba, whether it’s in Mississippi or Montana or Blow Me, North Dakota.

He removed a twenty-five-caliber automatic from under the dashboard and Velcro-strapped it to his right ankle. From under the seat he removed a small brown plastic-capped bottle of sulfuric acid, wrapped it carefully in a handkerchief, and slipped it into his pants pocket. Then he walked around behind the club and entered through the back door so he could sit in a dark area where the bar curved into the wall and watch the band and the dancers on the floor and the people eating at the tables in the front of the building.

TROYCE WAS ENJOYING
his T-bone, forking meat and french fries into his mouth with his left hand. He drank from his beer and winked at Candace. “Don’t be worrying, little darlin’. People like us is forever,” he said.

“You’re willful and hardheaded, Troyce.”

“If you don’t find your enemies, your enemies will find you.”

“My father’s nickname was Smilin’ Jack. He had impractical dreams. He thought he was gonna find gold in the Cascades,” she said.

“Yeah?” Troyce said, not understanding.

“I don’t know if he found his gold or not. If he did, he probably died doing it. He never came out of the mountains. But he believed in his dreams.”

“Your meaning is I don’t?”

“You don’t know how to dream. You’re caught up in a mission. You’re like a bat trying to find its hole in the daylight.”

“Wish you wouldn’t talk that way.”

“You break my heart,” she said.

He crossed his knife and fork on his plate and rested his hands on the table. “I thought you wanted to come here,” he said. “What the hell is going on?”

She stared at nothing, her face wan.

“I bet your old man was a good guy,” Troyce said. “It’s too bad he went away. But everybody gets hurt. Life’s a sonofabitch, then you die. In the meantime, you don’t let people run you over.”

She thought about leaving and walking back to the motel. But if she did that, eventually she would have to tell Troyce why — namely that she had recognized the man he had come to Montana to find. “The food is real good. I’m glad we came here,” she said. “After we eat, I’d like to go back to the motel, though. I’m not feeling too good.”

He picked up his knife and fork and began eating again. A few minutes later, up on the bandstand, the dark-skinned man in jeans and a denim jacket sat down in a straight-back chair and placed a Dobro across his thighs. Another musician lowered a microphone so it would pick up the notes from the Dobro’s resonator. The man in the denim jacket slipped three steel picks on his left hand and slid a chrome-plated bar along the guitar’s neck, the resonator picking up the steel hum of the strings, a sustained tremolo like the vibration in the blade of a saw. The band and the man in the denim jacket began to play in earnest. Troyce kept eating, seemingly unmindful of the music, his face empty.

Then he looked up from his plate and smiled. “What’s the name of that piece?” he asked.

She shook her head.

“It’s a Bob Wills number, ain’t it?” he said.

“I don’t know, Troyce,” she replied.

“‘Cimarron,’ that’s what it is,” he said.

“I got to go to the restroom. I really don’t feel good.”

But Troyce had spent a lifetime reading lies in other people’s faces. “Did that actor upset you? Tell me the truth. I’m not gonna hurt him. You got my word. But tell me what’s going on here.”

“I got the headspins, that’s all. I don’t know what it is.”

She got up unsteadily from the table and walked between the dance floor and the groups of people drinking at the bar. The actor was facing the bar, talking to his friends. When he saw her approach, he stepped away from them into her path. “Decide to join us?” he said.

“Tell the guy playing the bottle-neck guitar that Troyce Nix is here. Tell him to get his ass out the back door,” Candace said.

“That’s J. D. Gribble. He’s a quiet, gentle guy. I think you’ve got him mistaken for somebody else.”

“I don’t know his name. If you like your friend, take him somewhere else, you hear me?” she said.

“What’d he do?”

“You asked if Troyce was in an accident. The accident was the guy up there on the bandstand.”

The actor raised his eyebrows and set his drink on the bar. His cheeks were slightly sunken, his jaw well defined, his eyes clear as he looked at her. “I’d like to help,” he said. “But it’s not my business.”

She walked away, not surprised by the actor’s unwillingness to involve himself in the plight of another, but oddly depressed just the same. When she returned from the restroom, the actor was still looking at her. “I did it,” he said.

“Did what?”

“What you said. I did it. But I don’t think J.D. could hear me over the noise. He was toking on a jay earlier. I tried. What’s your last name?”

“Why?”

“You’re fucking beautiful is why.”

“It’s my tattoos and the pits in my skin that turn men on,” she replied.

When she sat back down with Troyce, he was looking at her strangely. “Were you talking with that actor again?”

“He said I was beautiful.”

“He’s got good judgment.”

“My stomach’s not right. I’d like to go back to the motel,” she said.

“You’re jerking me around about something. I just don’t know what it is,” he replied.

“You ever hear of Looney Larry Lewis?”

“No.”

“He was a black roller-derby star in Miami. He told me I was the only girl he ever met who was as crazy as he was. He meant it as a compliment. I can’t finish my food.”

Troyce put down his knife and fork and sat back in his chair. He wiped his mouth with a paper towel and dropped the towel on the table. “I’ll get a box,” he said.

CLETE PURCEL CALLED
me on his cell phone just after nine P.M. I had not seen him all day. Since he had become involved with Special Agent Rosecrans, which in Clete’s case meant in the sack and in trouble, I had seen less and less of him.

“I’m in the parking lot of a joint on the two-lane in East Missoula. I could use some backup,” he said.

“What’s the deal?” I asked.

“I interviewed this prison guard Troyce Nix and his girlfriend at their motel, then decided to follow them later, just to see what might develop. So I ended up at this juke joint where—”

“Why are you following Nix?”

“Because both he and his girlfriend are hinky.”

“In what way?”

“The guy who tried to fry me had a mask on. I don’t think it was because he’s seen too many chain-saw movies. I think his face is deformed, like Nix’s or the sheriff’s or Leslie Wellstone’s.”

“We’ve talked about this before.”

“Quince Whitley is here, too.”

“Where?”

“At the juke joint. Are you listening to anything I say?”

“Anything else going on?”

“Yeah, J. D. Gribble is up on the bandstand. How’s that for a perfecta? Jesus—”

“What?”

“I’m outside. Gribble just came out the back door with this actor and some other people. What’s that actor’s name, the guy in that new western? They’re smoking dope.”