Swan Peak (44 page)

“They’re not to be bothered,” Hobbs replied, his expression flat, his gaze fixed on the mountains.

“Would you tell Ms. Wellstone I’d like to speak with her?” I said.

“She’s not here right now,” he replied.

“Do you know when she’ll return?” I asked.

“No sir, I don’t.”

“Would you know where she is?”

“With the driver and the maid and the little boy.Shopping, maybe. She’s real good at shopping.”

“You think your buddy Quince Whitley got a raw deal?” I asked.

Hobbs’s mouth was pinched, as though he were sucking in his cheeks. His dry, uncombed hair blew in the wind, his untucked short-sleeve shirt loose on his thin frame. “The way I hear it, Quince dealt the play. He wasn’t a bad guy. But he made mistakes in judgment sometimes,” Hobbs said. “I don’t play another man’s hand, if that’s what you’re trying to make me do.”

“You think Reverend Sonny Click offed himself,” I said.

This time his eyes found mine. “That’s what happened, right?” he said.

“I think he was unconscious when somebody strung him up,” I said. “I think somebody thought he was the weak sister in the chain. You’re a smart guy, Lyle. You were Mobbed up and in the life when the Wellstone brothers were getting blow jobs with their daddy’s credit card. What do you think is going to happen to you when you’re no longer useful?”

Clete leaned over to the passenger window. “Hey, Lyle, remember what Sally Dee used to always say: ‘There’re kings and queens, and then there’re worker bees.’ Did you know Sally read Machiavelli and Hitler in jail? Glad you’re not working for him anymore.”

Lyle Hobbs stared blankly at both of us. Nobody knew the skells better than Clete Purcel, and nobody was better at pressing thumbtacks into their heads.

LATER THAT AFTERNOON
Candace Sweeney and Troyce Nix were eating in the café that adjoined the nightclub on the lake when a long white limo pulled in and the daytime bartender, Harold, got out and went inside. He placed a take-out order for hamburgers and fries at the counter, then went into the nightclub and began fixing a drink with a blender behind the bar. The curtains were partially closed on the café’s front window in order to keep out the glare, but through a crack, Candace could see the extravagant full length of the limo and its charcoal-tinted windows, its bulk and mass and power a visible rejection of all those who set limitations on their own lives. The engine was running, the air-conditioning units on, the charcoal windows damp from the coldness inside.

“Why would people with money like that want to eat in a greasy skillet like this?” Candace asked.

“So they can pretend they’re like the rest of us,” Troyce replied.

“Why do they want to pretend to be like us?”

“So they can make us feel bad about ourselves. So they can tell us they made it but we didn’t.” Then he grinned at her in his old way, at the corner of the mouth, like the Duke. “Or maybe there just ain’t another place here’bouts to get good food.”

Candace felt like a clock was running faster and faster inside her, its wheels and cogs starting to shear, its hands spinning in a blur. “There’s still gold up in the Cascades, places where nobody ever found the mother lode,” she said. “My father swore it was there, up in the high country, up in the snow line. All those years it was washing down into the creeks, telling the panners down below where it was, but nobody was interested. Think of it, Troyce, maybe a vein three inches thick running through the face of a cliff you just have to sweep the snow off of.”

Troyce looked at her peculiarly. “Bet you and me could find it,” he said.

She waited for him to finish.

“Soon as we tie up things here,” he said.

He forked down the last of his chicken-fried steak and mashed potatoes and peas and took a final sip from his coffee. “I need to talk to that old boy in the saloon a minute.”

Candace realized who was in the white limo. “Leave them alone, Troyce.”

“Don’t worry. It’s them what better look out for us,” he said.

WHEN TROYCE ENTERED
the nightclub, Harold Waxman was pouring a daiquiri into a stemmed glass, wrapping a towel around the bottom to catch the overflow.

“Remember me?” Troyce said.

Harold lifted his eyes from his work. “I’m on my own time right now. If you want a drink, order from the other bartender,” he said.

“I’m a businessman. I don’t drink during the day,” Troyce said.

Harold Waxman wore black slacks and a black leather belt and a long-sleeve dress shirt that was so white it had a blue tint. Every hair on his head was combed neatly into place, with no attempt to disguise his growing baldness or advancing age. A toothpick protruded from the corner of his mouth. “The state of Texas hires businessmen as prison guards?” he said.

“I’m empowered to offer a reward for this escaped felon Jimmy Dale Greenwood,” Troyce said. “The reward pays upon custody rather than conviction. I’m talking about five thousand dollars.”

Harold Waxman propped his hands on the bar and stared at the video poker machines lined up against the far wall. “Number one, I don’t know any escaped felons. Number two, if I did, I’d call the Sheriff’s Department. Number three, this is the second time you’ve come in here pestering people. I’m hoping it’s the last.”

He looked at the young woman who had entered the saloon and was standing behind Troyce. “You want a drink, miss, you need to order from the man down the bar. I’m off the clock,” he said.

“I’m with him,” Candace said, nodding toward Troyce.

“My offer still stands,” Troyce said to Harold.

Harold let his eyes go flat and rolled his toothpick to the other side of his mouth. He poured the rest of the daiquiri from its pitcher into a large thermos. He did not look up again until Troyce and Candace were gone.

While Troyce paid the check in the café, the limo drove away with the bartender behind the wheel, the charcoal windows still closed to the heat outside.

“Why were you talking to that guy?” Candace asked.

“’Cause he’s hinky. ’Cause he’s working for the Wellstones now.”

“Hinky?” she said. “He’s a cop.”

“Maybe he used to be, but not now.”

“A cop’s a cop. I can always tell one. That guy’s a cop, Troyce,” she said.

“If he is, he’s for sale. I know a dishonest man when I see one.”

ONE HOUR’S CROOKED
drive to the north, up by the Canadian line, Jimmy Dale Greenwood entered a phone booth by a filling station at a crossroads, where a single traffic light hung suspended from cables over the intersection. He began feeding pocket change into the coin slot. Through the scratched plastic panels in the booth, he could see the wind blowing clouds of dust out of a wheat field, hills that had started to go brown in the summer heat, a windmill ginning on the horizon, a dead Angus bull swollen under a willow tree whose canopy looked like an enormous stack of green hay. A gas-guzzler loaded with Indian teenagers went through the red light and disappeared down the asphalt, a beer can bouncing end over end in its wake.

No answer. Jimmy Dale hung up the receiver and checked the heel of his hand where he had written Jamie Sue’s cell phone number. He dialed the number a second time.

“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.