Swan Peak (38 page)

The Whitley family not only resembled one another, they looked as though they had all descended from the same impaired seed. Their skin was the color of dust. Their expressions seemed incapable of showing either joy or grief. Briefly, one of the women looked at Jamie Sue with indignation, as though Jamie Sue were perhaps the cause of Quince’s death. Their ages gave no clue to their relationship with the deceased. An unkind observer might have said they possessed all the characteristics of livestock milling around in a feeder lot, waiting for their roles in the world to be imposed upon them.

The hearse from the funeral home arrived late, and Lyle Hobbs and the Whitley men lifted up the coffin and carried it inside. Five minutes later, we could hear the voice of Sonny Click booming from the church’s interior. In the slanting rays of the sun on the pines and the dilapidated shingle roof of the building, the scene was like a photograph taken in an earlier time, perhaps during World War II, when death came much more violently and prematurely to us than it does today, and disparate elements of the country were drawn together in humble surroundings to mourn the loss of a much admired man or woman. But the scene Clete and I were watching was quite different. Quince Whitley had probably been a misogynist, if not a misanthrope, and his mourners represented elements in our culture whose existence we either deny or whose origins we have difficulty explaining. But maybe what appeared to be myriad contradictions in the mourning ritual we witnessed that afternoon had more to do with the presence or absence of money in our lives than it did anything else.

For Whitley’s people, life and hardship and struggle were interchangeable concepts. Man was born in sin and corruption and delivered bloody and terrified from the womb. The devil was more real than God, and the flames of perdition roared right under the plank floor of the church house. The man with the power to shut down a mill or evict a tenant farmer’s family lived in a white house on the hill. But the enemy was the black man who came ragged and hungry into the poor whites’ domain and asked for part of what the white man had been told was his by birth. When people talk about class war, they’re dead wrong. The war was never between the classes. It was between the have-nots and the have-nots. The people in the house on the hill watched it from afar when they watched it at all.

Or at least that’s the way things were in the South during the era when I grew up.

After the service, the hearse drove to a cemetery four miles away, with the limo and the Whitley rental cars in tow. The grave had already been dug, the dirt piled on one side, a rolled mat of artificial grass dropped nonchalantly on top of it. The sun sliced through the pines and maples. In the spangled light, motes of dust and pieces of desiccated leaves floated like gilded insects. Clete had said few words in the last hour, and I wondered if he was reliving the moments before he had sighted on the side of Quince Whitley’s head and pulled the trigger.

“We haven’t learned a lot here. You want to wrap it up?” I said.

“Let’s see it through,” he said.

We had parked the truck not over fifty yards up the road from the cemetery, but so far the mourners had either not taken notice of us or didn’t care whether we were there or not. Regardless, I didn’t want to see Clete forced to confront Whitley’s family. Sonny Click read from a Bible over the coffin, then the mourners held hands and lowered their heads while Click led them in prayer. Through the binoculars, I saw Leslie Wellstone fight to keep from yawning.

Then the mourners got into their vehicles and began leaving, while the funeral attendants waited to lower the casket into the grave.

“I’ll buy you supper,” I said.

“Hold on,” Clete said, pointing down the road with his chin.

A dark SUV had approached the cemetery from the other end and parked in the trees. When the last of the mourners had left, a big man got out of the SUV and walked to the grave site. A long-necked bottle of beer protruded from his right pants pocket.

“It’s what’s-his-name, the bartender from the club on the lake,” I said.

“Harold Waxman, the blue-collar suck-up guy.”

“Wait here,” I said.

“What for?”

I walked away without offering an explanation. The afternoon sun was waning, which meant Clete’s need for alcohol and the irritability that went with it were growing by the minute. As I entered the cemetery, the funeral attendants were lowering the casket on the motor-operated pulley. Harold Waxman said something to them, then twisted off the cap on his beer bottle and poured the beer on top of the coffin.

“Buying Whitley a last round?” I said.

He looked at me indifferently. “I’m taking over his job. I figured he deserved one for the road,” he replied.

“You’ll be working for the Wellstones?”

“Just for Ms. Wellstone. She doesn’t have a personal driver right now.” He looked past me at Clete, who was standing in the shade by my truck. “Your friend up there is the one who capped him?”

“No, my friend is the one who stopped Whitley from shooting an unarmed woman.”

“Some kill. Whitley couldn’t hit the ground with his hat.” Harold Waxman tossed the beer bottle into the grave. It clanked and rolled off the rounded top of the casket and landed with a thud in the dirt.

CHAPTER 21

AFTER JIMMY DALE
Greenwood had recognized Troyce Nix coming out of the nightclub, he had driven straight to his cabin, packed his duffel bag, and stuffed his twenty-two Remington rifle inside. Then he dropped off Albert’s truck in the driveway, and under a gunmetal sky sprinkled with stars that smoked like dry ice, he hitched a ride over Lolo Pass into Idaho.

He should have kept going and beat his way on a two-lane back road up through the Idaho Panhandle into Canada. The international frontier was a sieve, and everyone knew it. All he had to do was get into British Columbia and go on the drift again. In Canada, logging was subsidized, and the exportation of lumber to the United States was booming. If he got tired of whittling trees, he could catch the wheat harvest in Alberta, or work the cod and salmon trawlers on the coast, or beat his way on up to Alaska. There were still streams in Alaska that had float gold in them, and veins in the mountains that a pick had never glazed. The choices were his. If he just stayed in motion, that was the trick.

Stay in E-major overdrive and don’t think
, he told himself. Flat-wheelers and hotshots were still free, the world of the side-door Pullman no different than it was in 1931. The only real crime for a bum in the United States was not to have a destination. If you stayed in motion, cops and yard bulls left you alone. Tell one of them you planned to stay in town for a few days, and you’d find yourself on the way to the can. Whether riding the spines or the blinds on the Burlington or the Northern Pacific, or traveling free on the old SP, all of North America and its infinite promise waited for him. Woody had said it a long time ago: This land was made for you and me. You claimed it with a thumb out on the highway or running alongside an open boxcar, a guitar strung on your back.

Except he didn’t have a guitar. He had left it in the parking lot in front of the nightclub, sulfuric acid eating into its case. What he did have was a head full of snakes. He knew Troyce Nix would eventually find and kill him. He also knew he would never have any peace of mind until he got Jamie Sue back, and not only Jamie Sue but his little boy as well.

There were still places where people could live off the computer, he told himself, mountain drainages right off the highway, up in the high country on the Idaho-Montana line. He knew a town in northern Nevada, at seven thousand feet elevation, where everyone got his mail at general delivery and did nothing but play cards and catch trout in a river that was so cold the rainbows had a dark purple stripe along their sides. A rodeo friend of his, a rough stock handler, owned a lettuce farm in Imperial Valley and had always said Jimmy Dale could buy into it, paying on the deed with the work he put in. Or up in eastern Utah he could chicken-ranch, bust rescued mustangs, contract Mexican farm labor, or build an irrigation system that could make a desert bloom. Just him and Jamie Sue and little Dale.

Woody Guthrie had believed the country was a grand song. Jimmy Dale believed it still was. If you jumped a flat-wheeler headed through West Kansas, all in one day you could see silos silhouetted against a storm-black sky, oceans of green wheat thrashing in the wind, then sagebrush hills in eastern Colorado and the Rockies rising up out of the sun’s hot shimmer on the hardpan — blue and snowcapped and strung with clouds. That same night your boxcar would be sliding down the other side of the Grand Divide, the wheels locked and squealing on rails that rang with cold in the moonlight. It was just a matter of choice. How had his old cellmate Beeville Hicks put it? “Everybody stacks time. You just got to decide where you want to stack it at.”

In spite of all his poetic visions about a future with Jamie Sue and little Dale, one irrevocable fact stayed with him like a thorn driven under the fingernail: Troyce Nix was still out there, his wounds still green, his ferocious energies unabated and hungry for revenge.

Jimmy Dale still couldn’t figure out exactly what had happened in the parking lot. He had accidentally stumbled into a situation involving one of the Wellstones’ lowlifes and a girl he had never seen before. But how had Nix shown up at exactly that moment? Why was the private detective following this greasebag Quince Whitley around? Why was Nix in the club? Thinking about it all made Jimmy Dale’s head hurt.

Regardless of what had happened, the dice were out of the cup. Jimmy Dale could head for Canada or turn his life around. He decided on the latter, but not in the way a preacher would necessarily recommend.

On Tuesday night he boosted a gas-guzzler from a used-car lot in Sand Point, Idaho, switched the plates in Superior, Montana, and on Wednesday morning walked into a gun store in Missoula.

“I’d like a box of them twenty-two long-rifle hollow-points,” he said to the clerk.

CANDACE SWEENEY COULD
never figure out what was going on in Troyce’s head. Only last night he had started acting weird, telling her that he had to be gone for a while, he had to run errands around Missoula, did she want anything from the grocery store?

“A thermometer. So I can take your temperature,” she had replied.

Then early this morning he had gotten up and met a man outside who was driving a new Ford pickup, one with an extended cab. She had watched through a crack in the curtains while Troyce took everything he owned from the SUV, plus a cake box and a big paper bag from Albertsons, and put it in the truck.

“Get dressed. We’re going up Rock Creek,” he said.

“What for?”

“It’s that kind of day.”

“Where’d the truck come from?”

“Bought it.”

“Why?”

“’Cause an SUV is a big box on wheels that carries air around inside itself and don’t have no other purpose.”

“Troyce, has this got anything to do with—”

“With what, little darlin’?”

“That man you been chasing — Jimmy Dale Greenwood. He saved me from getting acid thrown in my face. Doesn’t that count for something?”

“Get in the truck, you little honey bunny.”

“Stop calling me dumb names.”

“They ain’t dumb. They’re from the heart, too.”

“You do it when you don’t want to talk about things.”

“If you ain’t Venus de Milo on skates.”

She shook her head in dismay.

They drove through Hellgate Canyon and crossed the Blackfoot River and followed the Clark Fork for another ten miles, then entered a spectacular mountain drainage called Rock Creek. The mountains on either side of the valley were thickly timbered and rose straight up into the sky, and the creek down below ran fast and clear over a bed of green and purple and apricot pebbles, the riffle undulating out of boulders marked with water-worn troughs like creases in elephant hide.

Troyce parked the truck in a grove of aspens and cottonwoods and dropped the tailgate. The wind was cool and fluttered the leaves in the grove and smelled of wood smoke from a log house set back in a meadow. “I want to show you something,” he said. He removed an antler-handled knife from the scabbard threaded on his belt. He gripped the blade between the tips of his fingers and his thumb, the handle pointed down. His whole body became motionless, the veins in his forearms as thick as soda straws. “You watching?”

“What are you doing, Troyce?”

He kept his eyes straight ahead. Then he flung the knife sideways, end over end, into a cottonwood trunk ten feet away. The blade embedded cleanly in the bark, the handle quivering with tension.

“Why’d you do that?” she asked.

“To show you what I can do in a fair fight. Except the man who busted off a shank in my chest don’t fight fair.”

“I’m not saying he does. I’m just saying sometimes you got to let the past go, no matter what people do to you.”

He pulled the knife from the tree trunk and wiped the blade on a square of paper towel he took from the grocery bag. “Would you get a fire started?”

He didn’t tell her; he asked.

He untied the leather thong on a canvas rucksack and removed two GI mess kits from it. Then he began slicing tomatoes and onions on a chopping board, his eyes darting sideways as she hunted for sticks and pinecones to place inside an old fire ring. “You like ham-and-cheese omelets?” he asked.

“Everybody does.”

“You like strawberry cake and ice cream that’s been put on dry ice?”

“What’s the occasion?”

“It’s your birthday.”

“No, it’s not.”

“We’re celebrating your last birthday a little late or the upcoming one a little early. So that makes today your birthday. I used the Internet at the public library.”

But she didn’t make the connection and had no idea what he was talking about. She dropped a pile of kindling into the fire ring and dusted her hands. “The Internet?” she said.

“I downloaded a bunch of information and printed it up. Get that manila folder out of the glove box. I thought we might need this truck. If you live rural, you got to own a truck.”