Swan Peak

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.”

She got the manila folder from the box and opened it on the truck’s hood. “You downloaded this from a real estate Web site in Washington?”

“They got acreage for sale all up through the Cascades. I done talked to the agent already. Look at that sheet of notepaper in there.”

She lifted up a piece of lined paper that had been torn from a spiral notebook. On it was a long list of figures.

“That’s my total assets. I’m selling off my stock in the prison. That’ll give us a hundred and sixty-eight thousand dollars. I got twenty-three thousand in an Ameritrade account, and a couple of commercial lots in El Paso. Way I see it, we can build us one of those log-kit houses on land that comes at about ten grand an acre. We can get a mortgage on the house and land and still have money left over for that café you was talking about.”

She felt her eyes moistening. “I’m not contributing very much, Troyce.”

He picked her up, high on his chest, his arms propped under her rump. She held on to his neck, her breasts pressed into his face, her cheek against his hair.

“I ain’t sure there’s a God, but I suspect there is or I wouldn’t have you,” he said. “And I’ll call you all the silly names I want.”

THAT SAME MORNING Jimmy Dale Greenwood parked his boosted gas-guzzler at a truck stop just outside the sawmill town of Bonner and dropped several coins into a pay phone. Even as he punched in the cell number given to him by the young actor at the nightclub, his hand hesitated. There was still time to back out. He was a half-continent away from the prison he had broken out of. Had he come all this way to step irrevocably across a line, one that had less to do with the law than with the image of the man he believed himself to be? He had never been a violent man and had originally gone to jail for stopping an assault on a prostitute. Even when he had cut up Troyce Nix, he had done so only because all his other selections had been used up.

Then he thought about Nix again and the labored hoarseness of his voice in Jimmy Dale’s ear and his fingers seeking purchase on Jimmy Dale’s hip bone. The memory of it caused the cars and trucks out on the interstate to blur and shimmer for a moment. He clicked the rest of the actor’s phone number into the telephone pad, his heart beating.

“G’day,” a voice said.

“It’s J.D. You said call you if I need a favor. You sound like an Australian.”

“I’m rehearsing for my new picture. Where you been, bud? You’re a hero.”

“I cain’t figure out what was going on in the parking lot Friday night. Who was the woman that guy was trying to throw acid on?”

“I told you about her when you were on the bandstand. But you couldn’t hear me over the noise. I think my friends’ weed had herbicide on it, too.”

“Told me what?”

“She said some guy named Nixon was after you. I told her she probably had the wrong guy.”

“You mean Nix? She was with Troyce Nix?”

“Yeah, that was the name. She said they were staying at a motel down the road. Look, if you’re in L.A., give me a call. I’ll hook you up, man. This place is dangerous. J.D., you still there?”

For the next half hour, Jimmy Dale cruised up and down the highway, checking out the motels in Hellgate Canyon and on East Broadway. Some were upscale, some were dumps. He guessed Nix would stay in a place that was clean and squared away, located by a restaurant that served steaks. A trusty in records back at the prison had said Nix was kicked out of the army for something he did in Iraq, but Nix still had a military tuck in all his clothes and hated dirt and disorganization, and on the hard road he knew where every man and shovel and machine was at any given moment.

But Jimmy Dale didn’t know what kind of vehicle Nix was driving, so his knowledge about the man’s habits was of little value to him. Also, he was sweating inside his clothes, his mouth was dry, and the unmistakable odor of fear was rising from his armpits. He ordered a big take-out meal at the McDonald’s drive-through window on East Broadway and tried to eat it in the park across the river. The hamburger tasted like wood pulp, and when he drank the milk shake too fast, he had a brain-freeze that made him double over on the picnic bench.

A little girl at the next table pointed at him and said, “Mommy, look, the funny man has ice cream coming out his nose.”

He stuffed his food in a trash can and got back in his gas-guzzler. His duffel bag with the twenty-two pump inside lay on the backseat. His heart was racing, his thoughts like lines of centipedes crawling around inside his head. He could not remember ever being this afraid. But why? Because he didn’t have the guts to kill Troyce Nix, a man who had sodomized Jimmy Dale and come all the way to Montana to make his life even more miserable than it already was? Maybe Nix had recognized Jimmy Dale early on for the punk he had always been. Maybe he deserved what had happened to him back at the prison.

As he drove out of the university district and headed back through Hellgate Canyon again, he secretly hoped that fate would intervene and he would not find Troyce Nix. Then, almost as though a malevolent prankster were orchestrating a script that controlled his life, Jimmy Dale looked through the windshield at a dark blue truck turning out of traffic into a motel that was only a few hundred yards from the club where Quince Whitley had died. There was no mistaking the woman in the passenger seat. She was the one whose life he had saved. There was also no mistaking the chiseled profile and big chest and shoulders of the man behind the wheel, or the way he wore his Stetson at a jaunty angle or the way he grinned at the corner of his mouth when he told a joke. Jimmy Dale felt like he had just swallowed a cupful of diesel fuel.

He drove past the motel and pulled in behind a truck stop where he could watch Nix and his girlfriend getting out of their pickup.

Okay, you found out where they’re at, he told himself. But you cain’t do anything sitting here except get yourself busted. Come back later, when they’re going to dinner or to a movie or to wherever in Montana psycho gunbulls and tattooed women hang out at. You don’t have to prove anything.

He was lying and he knew it. He was scared of Troyce Nix, and he was scared of going back to the joint, and he was scared his friends outside of prison would learn what Troyce Nix had done to him. In fact, Jimmy Dale Greenwood wanted to chamber a round in the Remington, slide the muzzle over his teeth, and drive a hollow-point through the roof of his mouth into his own brain.

Maybe he had always been a loser from the jump, he thought. Most of his life, he had lived within a few hours’ drive of Austin, the same place Willie Nelson and Jerry Jeff Walker and a dozen like them had started out. But Jimmy Dale had never made it to Austin, convincing himself that a real artist played shithole beer joints and didn’t compromise his music for commercial success. How about Mac Davis and Buddy Holly and Waylon Jennings and Jimmy Dean? All of them had grown up within spitting distance of Lubbock, all of them poor and without much education, or at least as poor as Jimmy Dale’s family had been, but today their names were known all over the world.

Jimmy Dale always told others that if you’re a rodeo man, “you ride it to the buzzer.” But in truth he had never ridden it to the buzzer and had set himself up to fail. One lesson you learned quickly in prison: Once inside, time stopped, and you didn’t have to make comparisons. Outside the walls or the fences topped with coils of razor wire, you had to keep score. Inside the system, the reflection you saw in a mirror was no problem. Everybody around you was a loser. The big score of the day was to get high on pruno or nutmeg and black coffee or have a punk free of AIDS delivered to your cell.

Jimmy Dale could feel tears welling in his eyes. Screw Troyce Nix, he thought. I cain’t shoot the guy in the middle of town. It ain’t supposed to happen. I give it my best and I’m out and that’s it.

He fired up his stolen car, a gush of oily smoke bursting from the exhaust pipe, and waited for a tractor-trailer to clear the diesel pumps so he could pull back on the two-lane. Then he saw Troyce Nix and his girlfriend emerge from their motel room and walk toward their pickup truck, chatting with each other, the sunlight warm on their faces.

You gonna do Nix or let him do you? What’s it gonna be, waddie? a voice inside him said.

Jimmy Dale hit his fist on the steering wheel. When Nix was in the traffic, Jimmy Dale pulled onto the two-lane, three cars behind Nix, hating all the forces that had made him the driven man he was.

TROYCE AND CANDACE bought camping supplies and warmer clothes at Bob Wards, and groceries and gasoline at Costco, then drove through an underpass into North Missoula and parked their truck at a recreation area in a poor neighborhood where a chapter of Narcotics Anonymous was holding a five-fifteen meeting and a potluck supper.

Troyce didn’t understand why Candace wasted her time with a bunch of addicts, since she didn’t use dope anymore or have any of the dependent characteristics that he associated with junkies. But live and let live, he thought, and carried a paper plate of fried chicken and potato salad to a lone table among maple trees behind the baseball diamond backstop. Through the wire screen, he could see the whole panorama of the park: worn base paths, the patches of yellow grass in the outfield, an empty swing set in the distance, houses along the street that had no fences between them, and gardens where vegetables grew rather than flowers.

Most poor neighborhoods didn’t have fences, he thought. The porches had gliders on them and sometimes stuffed couches. On one corner there was a small grocery store with a neon bread ad in the window. An ancient brick firehouse, painted lead-gray, stood on another corner. Unlike in subdivision neighborhoods, sidewalks connected the houses. A kid was flying a kite emblazoned with the image of the comic-book hero Captain America, the kite stiffening in the wind, rising higher and higher into a perfect blue sky.

How had he, Troyce Nix, ended up in both the Abu Ghraib prison and this working-class neighborhood in the northern Rockies? He was the same man and had the same hair, skin, eyes, bone, and sinew that had defined him in the mirror many years ago. How had he gone from the winter-green palm-dotted alluvial floodplains of the Rio Grande Valley to an Iraqi prison whose floors during the regime of Saddam Hussein had been stained by fluids that had become part of the stone and could not be scrubbed out? And from there to a contract jail where, in many ways, he had stacked time inside the machinations and perversity he had helped create and to which he had given legitimacy?

Now, on a breezy, warm afternoon in a town that was ringed by mountains and traversed by three rivers, he was eating by himself at a picnic table carved with names and initials and hearts and arrows, like petroglyphs left by ancient people on a cave wall, while one hundred feet away a woman he had come to love sat among junkies, ex-prostitutes, and petty boosters, waving at him, her face full of joy and expectation, her faith and belief in him like that of a child.

Beyond the baseball diamond, a gas-guzzler was parked in the shade, its paint pocked with blisters. Had he seen the same vehicle at Bob Wards or at Costco? There were shadows on the windshield, and Troyce could not tell if anyone was behind the steering wheel. A city groundskeeper was driving a mower along the swale, the discharge from the blades firing sideways against the parked vehicle, pinging the metal with chopped-up pinecones, blowing a cloud of dust and grass cuttings through the open window.

Troyce bit into a drumstick and turned his attention back to the dancing kite emblazoned with the shield and winged helmet and masked face of Captain America. For some reason, backdropped by a blue sky, it seemed the most beautiful piece of art he had ever seen.

THE GRINDING AND pinging sounds of the mower were like slivers of glass in Jimmy Dale’s ears. He waited until the driver had threaded his machine around a couple of trees and had turned onto the swale on the park’s far side, then he got into the backseat and slid the Remington pump from the duffel bag.

Now he was in a perfect shooter’s position. His vehicle was inside dark shade, the rifle easily concealed below the level of the passenger window, his target lit by spangled sunlight on the other side of the ball diamond. By propping the rifle over the right front seat, he could fire at an angle out the passenger window, hiding the muzzle flash, perhaps even muffling the report. He could probably get off two shots before anyone realized what had happened.

He pumped a round into the Remington’s chamber and sighted on Troyce Nix’s yellow-tinted aviator glasses. Even if he missed, the round would strike the side of a parked truck, so he was not endangering an innocent person. There was no excuse for not taking Nix out. He’d be doing Nix a favor, pocking one right through the lens, following it up for good measure with a second one in the forehead, putting him out of his perverted misery, maybe saving somebody else from being raped at another contract prison.

Then a kid pulling a kite string ran across Jimmy Dale’s line of vision. The wind had dropped, and the kite was dipping precariously close to the tops of the maple trees that bordered the park. Jimmy Dale lowered the rifle, easing the hammer down on the firing pin with his thumb, and watched the kid coiling up his string, running backward, lifting the kite’s tail across the top branches of a maple. Jimmy Dale let out his breath and felt his heart slow and his pulse stop jumping in his neck, as though someone had declared a temporary truce in his war with Troyce Nix, just so everyone could watch a young boy save his kite from crashing into a treetop.

Then the wind gusted across the baseball diamond, blowing a cloud of fine dust from the base paths, and the kite rattled against its stick frame again and rose steadily into the sky. Now the kid and his kite were safely out of the way, and Jimmy Dale’s view of his target was unobstructed, his choices clear. He raised the rifle, thumbed back the hammer, and sighted on Troyce Nix’s face, his pulse beating in his throat.

The mowing machine was headed down the swale toward Jimmy Dale’s vehicle, the engine roaring louder and louder, rocks splintering sideways off the blades. Jimmy Dale looked through the back window, the rifle balanced across the top of the passenger seat. The groundskeeper was turning the mower around, cutting a clean swath through blue fescue back toward the far curb. Jimmy Dale threw the rifle stock to his shoulder, put Nix’s mouth squarely in the steel notch on the rifle barrel, and slowly tightened his index finger on the trigger.

I’m gonna blow your cranberries, Cap. This is for every guy you sodomized back at the joint. Hope you find a shady spot in the flames.

Then something snapped inside his head, like a wound-up rubber band breaking behind his eyes. His breath exploded from his chest. He jerked his hand free of the trigger guard and jacked open the chamber, ejecting the unfired round on the car seat. Outside the car, the mowing machine scotched the top of a tree root into pulp.

Once again, Jimmy Dale had failed. But this time he didn’t care. He wasn’t a killer, no matter what Troyce Nix or the world or the prison system had done to him. Then he realized all the sound had gone out of his ears. The entire park seemed empty of voices or birdsong or the rattle of a kite in the wind or the roar of a grass-cutting machine. He opened and closed his mouth as though he were inside the cabin of a plane losing pressure at high altitude.

The problem was not with his hearing. The groundskeeper had hit the kill button on his machine and was staring through the back window of Jimmy Dale’s vehicle. “That man’s got a gun!” he shouted, his finger pointing frantically.

Jimmy Dale piled into the front seat, fired up his stolen gas-guzzler, and left a cloud of blue smoke behind him.

When Candace Sweeney got to Troyce Nix’s side, he was staring at the now empty street and the elevated interstate the street fed into.

“It was him, wasn’t it?” she said.

“That boy just don’t learn. He’s a real hardhead is what he is.”

She waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. “We’re leaving tonight, though?” she said. “Right, Troyce? Nothing has changed.”

“I think we might have to put things on hold a little bit,” he replied. He removed his shades and pinched his eyes, as he always did when he did not want her to see the thoughts he was thinking.