Swan Peak Read online

  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 fi
rst 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 c
losed 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.