Swan Peak

CHAPTER 26

THE PREVIOUS AFTERNOON, after Troyce had talked to the bartender at the nightclub, he had been silent all the way back to the cottage. Then he had left Candace by herself and gone away for three hours, claiming he had to get the truck serviced and to buy pike-fish tackle at Seeley Lake. This morning he had gotten up in the false dawn and had showered in cold water because the pilot had gone out on the tank; in the frigid temperature of the kitchen, without shoes or a shirt on, he had fixed breakfast for both of them but had left most of his uneaten on the plate. Minutes later, without explanation, he had driven off in the first pink touch of sunrise on the birch trees, leaving her a fifty-dollar bill to buy lunch in case he wasn’t back by noon.

But he returned four hours later, a lump of cartilage working in his jaw, the armpits of his red shirt dark with sweat. He clenched his stomach, his face white around the mouth with discomfort.

“You sick?” she said.

“I got to go to the can,” he replied.

Ten minutes later, he came out of the bathroom, drying his hands on a towel, blowing out his breath. “I feel like I was poisoned. What’d I eat last night?”

“What you always do – steak.”

“Anyway, I’m okay now. Let’s pack it up,” he said.

“We just got here.”

“That’s right. We been here. So let’s go see some other place.”

“Like where?”

“Glacier Park, then all points west. Next stop, the Cascade Mountains. How would you like that?”

“Where have you been, Troyce?”

“Here and yon, taking care of this and that. Come on, gal, let’s head ’em up and move ’em out.”

“Were you following that guy?”

“Which guy?”

“The bartender, the one that looks like he’s got strands of black wire combed across his head.”

“I just been taking care of business, that’s all. You don’t take care of business, somebody will take care of it for you, and that don’t usually work out too good.”

Fifteen minutes later, through the windshield of the truck, she watched the sun-spangled canopy of birches sweeping by overhead, the shadows of their leaves netting the dashboard and her skin and clothes, the ethereal blue-gray beauty of the lake and Swan Peak disappearing behind the truck. She looked at Troyce’s chiseled profile and cupped her hand on the point of his shoulder and tightened her fingers on the bone and muscle. But she didn’t speak, not at first, because she couldn’t find the vocabulary that would make Troyce understand her sense of apprehension.

“You fixing to tell me something?” he asked.

“No, because I haven’t figured it all out. When I do, I’ll tell you,” she replied.

“How am I supposed to read that, Candace?”

“I never had any understanding of the big mysteries and why things happen and why people get hurt and do the things they do to each other. I don’t think figuring it out comes with age, either. Otherwise we’d want to listen to old people. But we don’t, because most of them act selfish and childish and have to be tolerated and taken care of. I can’t even figure out us, much less anything that’s bigger than us.”

His eyes crinkled at the corners as though he was either amused by her words or honestly trying to understand them. He blew his horn and swung around a truck on the two-lane, pressing the accelerator to the floor, barely getting back in before he hit the double yellow warning lines. “You’re too deep for the likes of me,” he said.

“I made you a promise, but I’m not keeping it,” she said.

“What promise?”

“That I wouldn’t be here if you tried to hurt that man.”

“You talking about Jimmy Dale Greenwood?”

“I don’t want you to even use his name to me. Don’t say it. Don’t tell me why he’s so important to you, don’t tell me any of your lies. You make me resent myself, Troyce. That’s the worst thing somebody can do to somebody else.”

He looked at her, the pickup drifting across the center stripe, his face clouding. “’Cause of a guy like that, you’d throw everything we got out the window?”

She stared at the long tunnel of shadow and light and pines and fir trees and cottonwoods that seemed to be racing past the truck. She didn’t know if Troyce was being disingenuous or if he truly could not understand what she was saying to him. She rolled down the window and let the road’s trapped heat blow into her face, whipping her hair, stinging her skin with invisible pieces of grit.

Her adolescent and adult life had been spent proving her lack of dependence on others – hustling as a street kid in Portland, body-blocking other women senseless on the roller-derby circuit, cooking at hunting lodges for corporate executives who made jokes about learning from the Indians, namely how to do it dog-style in the great outdoors, wheezing while they told their jokes, their faces flushed and porcine above their drinks.

But the truth about Candace’s relationship with the world was otherwise. The defining moment in her life, the passageway that forever changed her, one that was like an arc of dark light across the sky, was the day Smilin’ Jack left her behind and entered the Cascades, his head full of dreams about the mother lode buried somewhere inside the clouds, his whole body full of love and energy and physical courage, smelling of aftershave lotion and pipe tobacco and the Lifebuoy soap he bathed in, full of everything except concern for the little girl he had abandoned.

Candace and Troyce spoke about little of consequence during the ride through Bigfork and down the two-lane that bordered the eastern shore of Flathead Lake. The day was bright, the wind drowsy and warm, the surface of the lake a hot blue, the highway full of vacationers on their way to Glacier Park.

“I think maybe you ought to drop me at the bus depot,” she said. “Time I fired myself as your number one douche bag and box of Valium.”

“Okay, here it is, little darlin’. I told you that bartender was a Judas of some kind, that he put me in mind of an egg-sucking dog hanging around a brooder house?” he said. “I followed him yesterday and today and was about to give up. Then I went into the café at the lake and had coffee. This waitress in there who tried to come on to me before says, ‘You still want to drive me home, Tex?’ I go, ‘I thought the bartender or your husband drove you home.’ She goes, ‘My husband is drunk, and Harold is running errands for Ms. Wellstone down at Arlee or something.’”

“You’re telling me you tried to pick up a waitress?” Candace said.

“Nooo,” he said, drawing out the word. “I’m not saying that at all. I was trying to get information from her. The waitress told me this guy Harold Waxman – that’s the bartender – was delivering a car to a bar in Arlee this afternoon, and she didn’t have a ride home from work. That car is for Jimmy Dale Greenwood. He’s blowing the country, and maybe he’s taking the Wellstone woman and his kid with him.”

“So all this time you’ve been talking about Glacier Park and the Cascades and starting up our café, you’ve really been planning on getting even with this guy? I think this pretty much does it for me, Troyce.”

“You’re not listening,” he said. “I’m going down to Arlee for one reason. It’s to look Jimmy Dale in the face and tell him I wouldn’t dirty my hands by giving him the beating he deserves. If I don’t do that, I’ll never have no peace.”

“You’re not gonna have any peace till you admit something else, either.”

“Like what?”

“That you made that guy’s life awful.”

“You still want to go to the depot?”

“Maybe,” she replied.

He glanced sideways at her, the right front wheel of the truck skidding rocks off the embankment into the water far below.

“No, I don’t want to go to the depot. You have a cinder block for a head, but you’re a good man. Your problem is, you don’t believe in the one person who tells you that,” she said. “That’s how come you hurt me.”

She saw the confusion in his expression. Then his face emptied and he looked straight ahead at the road, as though a solitary thought dominated all his senses and gave him a respite from the sounds constantly grinding inside his head. “People like us ain’t supposed to be apart, Candace. If you ever run off from me, I won’t never be the same, and I won’t never find nobody like you. That’s the way it is. After today, we’re gonna have the perfect life. I promise. I ain’t gonna hurt that man. You’ll see.”

MOLLY HAD PICKED a bouquet of lupine, Indian paintbrush, asters, harebells, wild roses, and mock orange and placed them in a glass pitcher of water in the kitchen window. She was washing her hands at the sink, and the wind was blowing across the meadow, swelling the curtains, tousling her hair. She dried her hands and turned around. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she said.

“It’s a strange day. There’re locusts all over the pasture. I could hear them hitting on the screens this morning,” I replied.

“July is a dry month,” she said.

“Maybe,” I said. But how do you tell someone the light is wrong, that it’s too bright, that the glare is of a kind you associate with a desert, with heat that dries mud bricks into powder and makes rocks sharper than they should be and burning to the touch?

“You want to go downtown today? The street market is open by the train station,” she said.

“If you’d like to,” I said.

“What is it, Dave? What bothers you all the time?”

Nothing other than an oblong black hole, one that waits for all of us.

“Nothing. I’m fine,” I said.

“Why did you get up in the middle of the night and oil your gun?”

“Primitive people believed they could drive evil spirits from the grave by firing arrows at them. Oiling a sidearm under a reading lamp in the dark makes about as much sense.”

I saw a question mark form on her face, then dissolve into an expression of loss and incomprehension. I saw her chest rise and fall, her eyes go away from me and return. “For good or bad, no matter what happens, we’re in it together,” she said.

“You’re a stand-up guy, Molly.”

“A guy?”

But I wasn’t interested in rhetoric or verbal assurances or defining myself or my relationship with my wife or even trying to explain how the measure of one’s life finally reduces itself to the possession of the moment, then the moment after that, moving through each of them in sequence from day to day, letting go of yesterday and asking nothing from the future except to be there for it.

“Good guys forever,” I said.

“Pardon?” she said.

I locked my hands around her back and lifted her into the air and walked with her into the bedroom, the bottoms of her bare feet touching the tops of my shoes.

“What you doing, cap’n?” she said.

I pulled her dress over the top of her head and kissed her on the mouth. She sat down on the side of the bed, wearing only her panties and a bra. She glanced toward the window. The curtains were billowing in the wind, and dust was rising from the field and we could see the shadows of ravens racing across the tips of the grass. “You hear a clock ticking, Dave?” she said.

I looked around the room as though I didn’t quite understand.

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“Hemingway once said three days can be worth a lifetime if you live them right,” I said.

“Hemingway shot himself,” she replied.

“He left behind books that people will read as long as there are books,” I said.

“But maybe no one told him that. Or he didn’t listen to them when they did.” She lifted her eyes to mine.

“No one knows what goes on in the mind of a suicide, Molly. They don’t come back to tell us.”

The room was silent.

She finished undressing and lay down and waited for me, indifferent to the fact that someone might walk up on the porch, or that a recreational rider might come down a trail on the hillside, or perhaps, more important, no longer worried about the lack of resolution in our discussion or a lack of resolution in the latter part of our lives.

When I was inside Molly, I saw images behind my eyelids that seemed to have little to do with marital congress. I saw gossamer fans floating inside a coral cave, a field of red poppies hard by the sea, a glistening porpoise sliding through a wave. I could feel her heart beating against my chest, her breath puffing against my ear. I could smell her hair and the heat in her skin, like a fragrance of flowers at first light. But Molly’s greatest gift to me during those erotic moments was simply her touch, the presence of her body under me, the grace of her thighs, the tightness of her arm across my back, the steady pressure of her hand at the base of my spine.

There are occasions in this world when you’re allowed to step inside a sonnet, when clocks stop, and you don’t worry about time’s winged chariot and hands that beckon to you from the shadows.

Then I felt a sensation that was like a fissure splintering down the face of a stone dam, spreading through my loins, collapsing my insides, draining my heart, pushing the light out of my eyes. I tried to stop it from happening, to make it last longer, to bring Molly inside the intensity of the moment with me, but she tightened her thighs and drew me deeper inside her and bit my neck and made a sound perhaps like the Sirens did when they lay atop rocks jutting from an ancient sea.

When it was over, I could hear no sound other than the wind in the grass outside and the hammering of my blood in my ears. When I kissed her again on the mouth, her fingers were wrapped in my hair, her body damp with sweat, our bedsheets imprinted with a moment I never wanted to leave.

That was when Albert knocked on the door and shouted that I’d had a phone call up at the main house.

“Who from?” I said from the bedroom as Molly drew the sheet over her breasts.

“She didn’t say. She said she’d call back in ten minutes,” he called through the screen. “She had an accent like a twanging bobby pin. She also sounded a little bit hysterical. Caller ID blocked. I’d leave her the hell alone. Message delivered. Adios.”

I dressed and went up to the main house. The phone rang in the kitchen just as Albert opened the front door. He went back to his office, and I picked up the receiver.

“Hello?” I said.

“Mr. Robicheaux?” a woman’s voice asked.

“What can I do for you, Ms. Wellstone?” I said.

“It’s Jamie Sue,” she replied, either correcting or not hearing me. “We’re in terrible trouble.”

“Who’s the ‘we’?”

“I think I’ve been betrayed. I think my husband found out.”

“About what?”

She hesitated. “I was supposed to meet Jimmy Dale. I bought a car for us and had it delivered by somebody I trusted. But I can’t leave the compound. All our cars are gone. Ridley and Leslie’s security men won’t take me anywhere, either.”

“Call 911,” I said.

“And tell them I’m meeting an escaped convict?”

“I can’t help you.”

“They’ve set up a trap. Clete doesn’t answer his cell. They’re going to kidnap or kill Jimmy Dale.”

“Where did you have the car delivered?”

She gave me the name of a bar on the Flathead res and described the vehicle.

“You said someone betrayed you.”

“I paid Harold Waxman to buy the car and park it at the bar in Arlee,” she said.

“You paid the bartender at the club on the lake, the man now working for your husband?”

“I thought he was my friend. It’s not my fault. I thought he was loyal. I can’t believe he sold us out.”

“What do you know about Waxman?”

“Nothing. He was a fan and an admirer. Maybe I’m wrong about him. Maybe Lyle Hobbs followed him. Maybe Harold is innocent. I don’t know what I’m saying anymore.”

I couldn’t help but wonder if her sense of betrayal had less to do with an individual than her discovery that fame and celebrity are cheap currency and seldom purchase loyalty in others. I wanted to ask why she hadn’t stuck by Jimmy Dale when he went to prison and why she had married into a collection of scum like the Wellstones. I wanted to ask if she ever felt remorse because she’d helped deceive the audiences who had bought in to Reverend Sonny Click’s charlatanism. I wanted to ask if she had ever thought about the suffering Seymour Bell and Cindy Kershaw had gone through before they died. But I already knew the answers I would get. Andy Warhol was dead wrong when he said every American is allowed fifteen minutes of fame. Fame comes to very few, and when it does, it takes on the properties of a narcotic and puts into abeyance our fears about our own mortality. Anyone who acquires a drug that potent does not give it up easily.

“Are you there?” she said.

“Clete knows nothing about your plan to run off with Jimmy Dale?” I said.

“No. Are you going to ask him to help?”

“Tell me, Ms. Wellstone, does it bother you at all that you’re asking a man you slept with to help you leave your husband and run off with a third man? No, let me rephrase that. Does anything at all bother you except the fact that you screwed up your life?”

“Yes, quite a few things bother me, Mr. Robicheaux. I deserted Jimmy Dale when he needed me most, and I married a monster. Now I have a little boy who may fall into the hands of the most evil people I’ve ever known. If you condemn me for it, I’ve earned every bit of your scorn and then some.”

The side of my face felt as though it had been stung by a bee when I replaced the receiver in the cradle.

“YOU SURE THIS is the place?” Candace asked as she and Troyce pulled off the narrow asphalt road in the middle of the Jocko Valley. A bar built of logs and topped with a peaked red roof was set back from the road, a few vehicles parked in front, the windows lit with neon beer signs.

“It’s got to be. There’s only one or two bars here,” he said.

“How do you know what the car looks like?”

“The waitress told me. The bartender came by the café with it.”

Troyce drove the pickup around the back of the log building, leaning forward to see beyond a parked tractor rig. His face was gray under his hat, the skin around his eyes whiter than it should have been. He cleared his throat and spit out the window.

Candace touched his cheek with the back of her wrist. “You’re sick,” she said.

He didn’t argue. All the way from Swan Lake, a pain like a shard of glass had been working its way through his viscera, causing him on a couple of occasions to suck in his breath as though his skin had been touched with a hot wire.

He pointed through the windshield. “Look yonder – a white Camry, just like she said.”

Candace had hoped they wouldn’t find it, that Troyce would give up his anger and pride and stubbornness and let go of his obsession with a man who perhaps someday he would meet on the street and smile at and shake hands with and feel neither ashamed nor resentful about. Candace looked around at the great empty bowl of the valley they were in, the Mission Mountains rising straight up into the sky, leviathan and green and so massive she thought they would crack the earth where they stood. The sun had reddened behind the smoke from forest fires and the thunderclouds building in the west, and the air smelled of dust and chaff blowing out of the fields. She thought she could smell rain in the air, too, although only an hour earlier, the sky had been clear and hot, the treetops glazed with heat. Now a shadow seemed to be slipping across the land from one end of the Jocko Valley to the other.

“This doesn’t feel right, Troyce,” she said.

“What don’t?”

“Everything – this place, that car, the way the light is changing, those dark clouds moving across the valley.”

“It’s probably just one of them dry electric storms. All snap, crackle, and pop, and not one drop of rain.”

“What do you know about that bartender? You said you knew a dishonest man when you saw one. Why do you trust what the waitress says? You like her boobs?”

“Cut that stuff out.”

“Then start thinking about what we’re doing.”

“It ain’t that complicated, darlin’. Jamie Sue Wellstone got that idiot to help her run away with an escaped felon. That makes the idiot a felon, too. But he ain’t figured that out yet. You know why criminals are criminals? It’s ’cause most of them majored in dumb.”

Troyce parked the truck thirty yards from the Camry and cut the engine. He closed and opened his eyes as though he were dropping through an elevator shaft.

“We need to take you to a hospital,” she said.

“I just need to hit the can. Come inside.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Sitting at the bar by myself in a joint on the res on Saturday afternoon? Duh!”

She watched him enter the back of the bar. Two Indian men who looked like father and son came out the side door. Both of them wore braided pigtails on their shoulders. They got into the cab of a flatbed and drove away, neither of them looking directly at her. She watched their vehicle disappear down the highway, over a rise, dipping into the sun, straw blowing off the bed of the truck. She wondered if they were going home to a Saturday-evening meal with the members of their family gathered around the table, an unwatched television set playing in the living room, the mountains gold and purple against the sunset. She wondered if a time would come when the simplest activities of others would not make her covetous.

The wind was picking up, and a solitary drop of rain struck her face like a BB just below the eye. She turned, wiping the wetness off her skin, just as a bus stopped on the road and a dark-complexioned man carrying a duffel and a rolled sleeping bag stepped down on the gravel in a whoosh of air.

He walked into the parking lot, carrying his bag on his shoulder, a shapeless, sweat-rimmed hat low on his brow. He was unshaved, his denim jacket tied by the arms around his waist. But incongruously, he wore an immaculate white long-sleeve cowboy shirt, one with pearl-gray snap buttons and a silver thread woven into the fabric.

He stopped and stared at the white car, then surveyed the parking lot and looked over his shoulder at the bar. His eyes seemed to linger on Candace’s for a moment, as though he recognized her, but the sun’s refracted glare was like a heliograph’s on the windshield, and it was obvious he could not make out her features. Oddly, without thinking, Candace had started to raise her hand from her lap and wave at him, as though they were old friends.

Jimmy Dale Greenwood set his duffel and rolled sleeping bag on the hood of the Camry and began fishing under the fender with one hand. When he could not find what he was looking for, he squatted on one haunch and put his arm deeper under the fender’s recesses.

Then a black cargo van backed up from the far side of the bar, not hurriedly, not in a dramatic fashion, merely creeping across the gravel as though the driver wished to create a wide arc in order to turn around. But when the vehicle stopped and the driver and two passengers got out, stepping down almost gently on the ground, Candace knew her premonitions were as they had always been – true and destined to be disbelieved by others.

The three men were not large; they were simply physical. They were the kind of men whose stare was always invasive, whose teeth were too big for their mouths, whose hard bodies were genetic and not earned, whose hands could be like the claws on a crab.

Where was Troyce? Why did he have to get sick now? Why had she not gone inside with him?

Jimmy Dale stood up from the Camry’s fender, his expression empty. The engine of the cargo van was running, the sliding side door open. The three men from the van formed a circle around him. One of them lit a cigarette and blew the smoke at an upward angle, as though he had stopped to shoot the breeze with a friend who was having car trouble. There was no one else in the parking lot. Candace could feel her ears popping and hear the wind whistling through the open windows of the pickup. The men from the van were smiling, touching Jimmy Dale on the arms, patting his back, picking up his duffel and sleeping bag for him, nodding reassuringly.

The sun dipped behind a cloud, and she saw Jimmy Dale’s eyes look through the pickup’s windshield and lock on her own. This time it was obvious he recognized her as the woman he had rescued from Quince Whitley in a Missoula parking lot. His expression was that of a man who knows he’s been tricked and lied to, taken over the hurdles again, treated for the fool he has always been. No, worse, it was the expression of a man who thinks he deserves his fate, who thinks the role of victim and loser is one he began earning from the moment of his birth.

He started to fight with the three men, kicking impotently while they held his wrists, their smiles still in place, as though they were protecting a drunk friend from himself.

Troyce, for God’s sake, get out here, she thought.

But the cavalry was in the can, and Candace Sweeney was on her own.

She reached under the seat and felt the cold touch of the lug wrench Troyce kept there. He had said, “Don’t let them bust you for carrying a concealed firearm. Carry a baseball bat or a lug wrench. Ain’t nothing like a wrench or a ball bat to make Christians out of unwanted presences.”

She clasped her fingers around the wrench’s shank and pulled it clanking from under the seat and opened the door and stepped out on the gravel, the wind cold on her face. The wrench was heavy in her hand, weighted with a rough-edged, thick steel socket welded on the tip. She began walking toward the Camry and the three men who held Jimmy Dale by his arms. The great green-gray density of the mountains seemed to tilt on the horizon. She felt small inside the vastness of the landscape, even smaller inside the wind that seemed to finger her blouse open, exposing her tattoos and her sagging breasts. In fact, she felt the entire valley was empty of people except her and Jimmy Dale Greenwood and the three men who had already started pushing him inside the van.

“Leave him alone,” she heard herself say.

“What’s that you’re saying?” one man asked. He was blond and chewing gum. He had green eyes that were like drills and biceps the size of softballs and an upper torso that was too long for his short height. There was an electric anticipation in his face, like that of a man riding on the crest of a wave. “Want a drink?” he said. “Let me get our friend in the car, and I’ll buy you a drink.”

“I said let him go. He hasn’t done you any harm.”

Jimmy Dale began to fight again, driving his boot heel into one man’s foot, spitting in another man’s face, dropping his weight down on his suspended arms to spear-kick the blond man in the groin.

“Get her out of here,” one of the other men said.

The blond man shoved her in the chest. “You heard him. Hoof it, sweet thing,” he said. “Our friend is plastered. You deaf? I said you haul your gash out of-”

She swung the lug wrench at him, tearing skin, breaking something, maybe his nose, maybe the ridge above his eye, but something that smeared blood and shock across his face.

“You stupid-” he said, holding one hand to his wound. Then he let out a sound like an animal whose foot was caught in a trap, except it was a grinding noise, one of personal offense and not pain.

She heard a brief buzzing sound, similar to downed power lines arcing in a puddle of water. Then something exploded in her chest, like steel tongs cutting deep inside her, expanding into places she did not know existed. Her knees buckled, a plaintive cry rose involuntarily from her throat, and she felt herself being thrown headlong into the cargo van, side by side with Jimmy Dale Greenwood, like two slabs of spoiled beef on their way to the acid pit.