Swan Peak Read online

  I had taken leave from the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department, where I made a modest salary as a detective-grade sheriff’s deputy. Hurricanes Rita and Katrina had spared our home on East Main in New Iberia. But Clete had watched the city of his birth drown. He had not recovered, and I was not sure he ever would, and I had hoped Montana would offer a cure that I could not. Clete was one of those who always tried to eat his pain and shine the world on. There was only one problem. His pain didn’t go away, and the booze he drank and the weed he smoked and the pills he dropped didn’t work anymore.

  But we would soon learn that the state of Montana, with all its haunting beauty, would not provide a panacea for either of us. Both of us had been here in the late 1980s, and neither of us had dealt adequately with the ghosts we had created.

  Clete had left the valley the previous day for two days of fishing in the Swan River country. But at one P.M. on the following day I saw his maroon Caddy coming hard up the dirt road. He passed Albert’s stone-and-log house up on the bench, passed the barn and horse pasture, and turned in to the rutted lane that led to our cabin. It was a bluebird day, one that had started off beautifully. I had a feeling that was about to change, and in truth I did not feel like fitting on a Roman collar.

  He told me what had happened that morning beside the creek on the ranch owned by a man named Ridley Wellstone.

  “You think they’re neo-Nazis or cultists of some kind?” I said.

  “A guy at the courthouse said Wellstone is a rich guy from Texas who moved here about a year ago. What doesn’t flush is this guy who ran over my fly rod. He said he remembered me from Lake Tahoe, that he was a driver for a car service there. Then he said he saw Sally Dio and his gumballs combed out of the trees after their plane crashed into a hillside in Montana.”

  Clete tried to hold my eyes, then looked away. His association with Sally Dio was not one he was fond of remembering. The circumstances of the plane accident that killed Dio were not details he cared to revisit, either.

  “Go on,” I said.

  “The guy was trying to tell me he never worked for Dio, but at the same time he was telling me he drove Dio around in Nevada and was at the site where Dio’s plane crashed. It’s coincidence he was in Montana on the res when Dio smacked into a mountain?”

  “In other words, he was one of Sally Dio’s people?”

  “Yeah, and a perv who molested a thirteen-year-old girl on top of it.”

  “Blow it off,” I said.

  We were sitting on wood chairs on the porch now. My fly and spinning rods were propped against a hitching rail, my waders hanging upside down from pegs on the front wall. The hillsides that bordered Albert’s ranch were dotted with ponderosa and larch and Douglas fir trees, and when the wind blew, it made a sound like floodwater coursing hard through a dried-out streambed.

  “The guy deliberately destroyed my tackle and lied in my face about it,” Clete said.

  “Sometimes you’ve got to walk away, Cletus.”

  “That’s what I did. And I feel just like somebody put his spit in my ear.”

  But I knew what was eating him. After Sally Dee’s plane had smacked into a hillside on the Flathead Indian Reservation, the National Transportation Safety Board determined that someone had poured sand into the fuel tanks. Clete blew Montana like the state was on fire. Now, unless he wanted someone asking questions about his relationship to Sally Dee and Sally’s clogged fuel lines, he had to allow one of Sally’s lowlifes to shove him around.

  “Maybe the deal with your fly rod was an accident. Why’s a guy like that want to pick a beef with you? Sally’s dead. You said it yourself. The guy in the pickup is a short-eyes. You don’t load the cannon for pervs.”

  “Good try.”

  “You can use my spinning rod. Let’s go down on the Bitterroot.”

  He thought about it, then took off his hat and put it back on. “Yeah, why not?” he said.

  I thought I’d carried the day. But that’s the way you think when your attitudes are facile and you express them self-confidently at the expense of others.

  IT WAS EVENING when the red pickup with the diesel-powered engine came up the dirt road, driving too fast, its headlights on high beam, even though the valley was only in part shadow, the oversize tires slamming hard across the potholes. The truck slowed at the entrance to Albert’s driveway, as though the men inside the cab were examining the numbers on the archway at the entrance. Clete’s Caddy was parked by the garage, up on the bench, against the hill, its starched top and waxed maroon paint job like an automobile advertisement snipped out of a 1950s magazine.

  The pickup truck accelerated and kept coming up the road, spooking the horses in the pasture. Molly was inside the cabin, broiling a trout dinner that we had invited Albert and Clete to share with us. I watched the pickup truck turn in to the lane that led to our cabin, and I knew in the same way you know a registered-mail delivery contains bad news that I had sorely underestimated the significance of Clete’s encounter with the security personnel on the ranch owned by a man named Wellstone.

  “Can I help you?” I asked, rising from my chair on the porch.

  The two men who had gotten out of the truck cab looked exactly as Clete had described them. The one with the recessed eye socket stared up at me, a faint grin on his face. He wore a short-sleeve print shirt outside his slacks. “My name is Lyle Hobbs,” he said. “That yonder is Albert Hollister’s place, is it?”

  “What about it?” I said.

  He glanced at the Louisiana tag on the back of my pickup truck. “Because the owner of that Cadillac parked up yonder told me he wasn’t working for any bunny huggers. But that’s not so. That means he lied to me.”

  “He doesn’t work for anyone. At least not in this state.”

  “My instincts tell me otherwise. I hate a lie, mister. It bothers me something awful.”

  I let the implication pass. “Maybe you should go somewhere else, then.”

  The other man, who was unshaved and had thick, uncut black hair with a greasy shine in it, stepped in front of his friend. “What’s your name, boy?” he said.

  “What did you call me?”

  “I didn’t call you anything. I asked you your goddamn name.”

  I heard Molly come out on the porch. The eyes of the two men shifted off me. “What is it, Dave?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I replied.

  “You tell Mr. Purcel he’s sticking his nose in the wrong person’s business,” Lyle Hobbs said. “Mr. Wellstone is an honorable man. We’re not gonna allow the likes of Mr. Purcel to besmirch his name. You tell him what I said.”

  “Tell him yourself,” Molly said. She was holding a heavy cast-iron skillet, the kind used to cook large breakfasts for bunkhouse crews.

  The man with black hair rubbed his thumb and forefinger up and down the whiskers on his throat, his eyes roving over Molly’s figure, a matchstick elevating in his mouth. “Sounds like somebody is whipped to me,” he said.

  I stepped down off the porch, my old enemy ballooning in my chest, tingling in my hands. “I strongly recommend y’all drag your sorry asses out of here,” I said.

  Lyle Hobbs continued to stare directly into my face, his eyes jittering. “We’re leaving. But don’t make us come back,” he said. “Those aren’t idle words, sir.”

  He walked back toward his truck, then turned around, cleaning one ear with his little finger. He ticked a piece of matter off his fingernail. There was an indentation at the corner of his mouth, like a wrinkle in clay. “It’s Robicheaux, isn’t it?” he said.

  “So?”

  “Sally Dee purely hated you and Mr. Purcel. Used to talk about what he aimed to do to y’all. I saw him knock the glass eye out of a hooker because she mentioned your name. He was a mean little shit, wasn’t he?”

  The sunlight was red across the valley as he and his friend drove back toward the state highway.

  “Who are they, Dave?” Molly asked after they were gone.

 
“Trouble,” I said.

  AFTER SUPPER, I talked with Albert about our visitors, the summer light still high in the sky, the valley blanketed with shadow, Albert’s gaited horses blowing in the grass down by the creek.

  “They do security for a man name of Ridley Wellstone? From Texas?” he said.

  “They seemed to know you,” I said.

  Albert had fine cheekbones, intense eyes, and soft facial skin that belied the nature of his earlier life. His hair was white and grew over his collar, and he often wore an Australian digger’s hat that hung from the back of his neck on a leather cord. His profile always suggested Byronic images to me, a poet wandering in the wastes, kicking at stone fragments along the edges of a collapsing empire.

  “They sound like worthless fellows to me. What was that other name you mentioned?” he said.

  “Clete had a bad period in his life and got mixed up with some gamblers in Vegas and Tahoe. One of them was Sally Dio.”

  “You talking about the Dio family out of Galveston?”

  Oops.

  “That’s the bunch,” I replied.

  “They weren’t gamblers, they were pimps. They ran all the whorehouses. Clete worked for them?”

  “For a while. They held his hand in a car door and slammed the door on it,” I said.

  Albert set his boot on the bottom rail of the fence and gazed out at the pasture. His wife had died of Parkinson’s three years past, and he had no children. His whole life now consisted of his ranch in the valley and another horse ranch he operated on the far side of the mountain. I wondered how a man of his extreme passions lived by himself. I wondered if sometimes his private thoughts almost drove him mad. “If those fellows come back around, send them up to the house,” he said.

  Not a good idea, I thought.

  “Are you hearing me, Dave?” he said.

  “You got it, Albert,” I said.

  “Look at the horses out there in the grass. You know a more beautiful place anywhere?” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do if a man tried to take this from me.”

  I’M NOT SURE I believe in karma, but as one looks back over the aggregate of his experience, it seems hard to deny the patterns of intersection that seem to be at work in our lives, in the same way it would be foolish to say that the attraction of metal filings to a magnet’s surface is a result of coincidence.

  On Saturday morning Molly and Albert drove into Missoula to buy groceries at the Costco on the edge of town. They stopped on the way home to pick up a new Circle Y saddle Albert had ordered from the tack shop in the back of the Cenex. While Albert paid for his saddle, Molly drank a can of soda inside the store and watched the customers gassing up their vehicles at the pumps or lining up at the fast-food drive-by window next door. The day was lovely, the sky blue, the Rattlesnake Mountains to the north glistening with lines of snow that had fallen during the night. It was what a Saturday in America should be like, she thought, a day when family people stocked up on groceries and spoke with goodwill to one another inside the freshness of the morning.

  On a newspaper rack directly behind her, the front page of the Missoulian contained a headline story about the discovery of a coed’s body in a canyon one mile from the University of Montana campus. The girl’s high school yearbook picture stared placidly at the customers walking in and out of the store.

  A white limousine with several people seated inside it pulled up beside a gas pump, and a man who must have been six feet four got out of the back and came inside the store with the help of aluminum forearm crutches. He wore a pearl-gray Stetson, shined needle-nosed boots, an open-collar plum-colored shirt, and a gray suit that had thin lavender stripes in it. But it was his gaunt face and the suppressed pain in it that caught Molly’s eye. It was obvious that walking inside and struggling with the heavy glass door was a challenge to him, and Molly wondered why no one from his vehicle had accompanied him. In fact, Molly had to force herself to look straight ahead so the man on crutches would not think she was staring at him. When he got in line at the counter to pay for a newspaper and a package of filter-tipped cigars, she could see the set of his jaw and the rigidity of his posture out of the corner of her eye. There was a controlled tension in his expression, the kind you witness in people who are experiencing unrelieved back pain, the kind that dwells at the base of the spine like a thumb pressed against the sciatic nerve.

  One of the clerks tried to scan the man’s package of cigars, but her scanner came up empty. “Do you know how much these are?” she asked.

  “No, I don’t,” the man replied.

  “I’m sorry, I have to get a price check,” the clerk said.

  “That’s all right,” the man said.

  But he was not all right. His hands were squeezed tightly on the grips of his crutches, his face gray and coarse-looking, his breath audible. When he tried to shift his weight, Molly saw the blood drain from around his mouth. The teenage stock boy who had been sent on the price check could not find the rack where the cigars were.

  “Sir, maybe I could help,” Molly said.

  “I’m fine here,” the man said.

  “I was a nurse in-”

  “I’m fine,” he said, not looking at her, his expression empty.

  She felt her face tighten with embarrassment. She placed her soda can in a trash barrel and went outside. Albert was loading his new saddle in the camper shell that was inserted in the bed of his paint-skinned pickup. He shut the door on the camper and peeled the wrapper on a Hershey bar. “You drive, will you?” he said.

  The morning sun created a glare on the window as she backed out of their parking spot. Simultaneously, the white limo was backing up from the gas pump to make way for a motor home. Molly’s trailer hitch gashed the taillight out of the limo’s fender molding, sprinkling glass and chrome on the concrete.

  Lyle Hobbs got out from behind the wheel of the limo to inspect the damage. He chewed his lip, his fists propped on his hips, his dry hair blowing in the wind. He let out his breath and took off his aviator glasses and looked at Molly. “I guess if I was sitting on top of an elephant, you might have seen me,” he said.

  “That’s very clever. But people don’t usually back up from gas pumps. That’s why this store has an entrance and an exit. You drive into the entrance. You put the gas in your car and drive out of the exit. That’s usually understood by most literate people. Maybe the problem is with your dirty windows. Can you see adequately out of them?”

  “You’re Ms. Robicheaux, right?” he said. “Don’t even answer. Yes, indeed, here we are once again.”

  “This truck is mine. Address your remarks to me,” Albert said, standing on the pavement.

  But Lyle Hobbs continued to stare into Molly’s face and did not acknowledge Albert. “Can you tell me why we keep having trouble with you people?” he asked. “Is this ’cause I broke Mr. Purcel’s fishing rod?”

  “I’m sure ‘you people’ refers to a specific group of some kind, but I’m afraid the term is lost on me,” Molly said. “Can you explain what ‘you people’ means? I’ve always wanted to learn that.”

  The charcoal-tinted windows of the limo were half down. A gold-haired woman in back pressed the window motor and leaned forward, the sunlight striking her tan skin and blue contact lenses. “We’re late, Lyle. Check her insurance card and make sure it’s current,” she said. “The attorney will handle the rest of it.”

  “Your attorney won’t handle anything. Your vehicle backed into me, madam,” Molly said.

  But Molly had difficulty sustaining the firmness in her own words.

  The man sitting on the far side of the gold-haired woman was grinning at her, if indeed his expression could be called a grin. The skin on his face and head and neck looked like a mixture of pink and white and red rubber someone had fitted on a mannequin, except it was puckered, the nose little more than a bump with two holes in it, the surgically rebuilt mouth a lopsided keyhole that exposed his teeth. He toasted Molly with his champagne glass and
winked at her.

  She felt a wave of both pity and shame rush through her. Behind her, she heard the metallic clatter of the man who walked with the aid of forearm crutches.

  “I saw it all from inside,” the man with crutches said. “It’s our fault. We’ll repair our own vehicle and take care of theirs.”

  “This man here is Albert Hollister, Mr. Wellstone,” Lyle Hobbs said.

  The man on crutches paused. “You’re him, are you?” he said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Albert said.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” Wellstone said. “What’s the damage to your truck?”

  “The bumper is scratched. It’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Then we’re done here. You agreeable with that?” Wellstone said.

  “Your driver owes Mrs. Robicheaux an apology.”

  “He’s sorry,” Wellstone said. He got in the front seat of the limousine, propping his crutches next to him on the rolled leather seat. Then he flopped open his newspaper with one hand and slammed the door with the other.

  “Why is it I have the feeling someone just spit on the tops of my shoes?” Molly said.

  Albert sniffed at an odor he hadn’t detected earlier. He bent down and looked under the bumper of his truck.

  “What is it?” Molly said.

  “The trailer hitch punched a hole in the gas tank. I’ll need to get us a tow and have the tank welded or replaced.”

  “I should have seen the limo backing up. Dave and I will pay for it,” Molly said.

  “I just remembered where I heard that snooty fellow’s name,” Albert said.

  THAT AFTERNOON THE lead story on the local television news involved the death of the University of Montana coed. At sunset the previous evening she and her boyfriend had gone for a hike up a zigzag trail behind the university. When last seen, they had left the main trail and were hiking up through fir trees, over the crest of the mountain. The girl was found two miles away, in a stony creek bed. Her body was marbled with bruises, her skull crushed. The boyfriend was still missing.