Swan Peak

by James Lee Burke

  He kept sheep and Foxtrotters and saddlebreds and Morgans, and in a few years the grass that he watered constantly from his wells was a deep blue-green, not unlike the pastureland of central Kentucky and Tennessee.

  The waddies and drifters who worked for him were the kind of men who were out of sync with both history and themselves, pushed further and further by technology and convention into remote corners where the nineteenth century was still visible in the glimmer of a high-ceilinged saloon or an elevated sidewalk that had tethering rings inset in the concrete or an all-night café that served steaks and spuds to railroad workers in the lee of a mountain bigger than the sky.

  Most of them were honest men. When they got into trouble, it was usually minor and involved alcohol or women or both. They didn’t file tax returns or waste money on dentists. Many of them didn’t have last names, or at least last names they always spelled the same way. Some had only initials, and even friends who had known them on the drift for years never knew what the initials stood for. If they weren’t paid to be wranglers and ranch workers, most of them would do the work for free. If they couldn’t do it for free, most of them would pay to do it. When one of them called himself a rodeo bum, he wasn’t being humble.

  Their enemies were predictability, politics, geographical permanence, formal religion, and any conversation at all about the harmful effects of vice on one’s health. The average waddie woke in the morning with a cigarette cough from hell and considered the Big C an occupational hazard, on the same level as clap and cirrhosis and getting bull-hooked or stirrup-drug or flung like a rag doll into the boards. It was just part of the ride. Anybody who could stay on a sunfishing bolt of lightning eight seconds to the buzzer had already dispensed with questions about mortality.

  The man who walked up the dirt road had come in from the highway that traversed Lolo Pass into Idaho. He was dressed in khakis and a denim jacket and a shapeless gray felt hat that was sweat-stained at the base of the crown. His boots were pointed, cracked at the seams, the color leached from the leather; the chain on his wallet was clipped on his belt, the links clinking against his hip. When he spied Albert in the pasture, he set down his duffel bag and his guitar case and leaned one arm on a steel fence stake. He removed his hat and wiped his forehead on his jacket sleeve. A truck passed, driving too fast for the road, covering him with dust. The man chewed on a blade of grass and seemed to look at the truck a long time before he turned his attention back to Albert.

  “Climb through the fence if you want to talk to me,” Albert said.

  “I understand you might need a wrangler or a guy to handle rough stock,” the man said.

  “Where’d you hear that?” Albert said.

  “At the casino in Lolo.”

  “You a rodeo man?”

  “Not no more. Got busted up in Reno about four years back. I can still green-break them. I ain’t a bad trainer, either. I been a farrier, too.”

  “I’ll meet you up at the cabin in a few minutes,” Albert said. “The elk popped a few clips on my back fence.”

  “Got an extra pair of pliers?” the man asked.

  A half hour later, Albert drank a glass of iced tea on the porch of the cabin with the man in the denim jacket, both of them seated in wood rocking chairs. It was shady and cool on the porch, and the man in the denim jacket looked tired, filmed with road dust, not quite able to concentrate on the conversation. He asked if he could wash inside. When he came back out on the porch, his hair was wet and combed out on his neck, his shirtsleeves rolled up high on his arms.

  “What’s your name again?” Albert asked.

  “J. D. Gribble.”

  “You never got tattooed, J.D.?”

  “I guess I never saw the advantage in it.”

  “Ever spend time in jail?”

  “Some.”

  “Care to say what for?”

  “Not using my head, mostly.”

  “There’s a lot of that going around these days. Let’s see your guitar,” Albert said.

  J. D. Gribble unsnapped the lid on his case and lifted the guitar from the felt liner and rested it across his lap. “It was my grandfather’s. Gibson stopped making this model about sixty years ago,” he said.

  Albert put on his glasses and leaned forward to read the names that had been signed on the box. “Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Lucinda Williams, Jerry Jeff Walker,” he said. “You know these people?”

  “I’ve sat in with them.”

  “When that truck threw dust all over you, what were you thinking about?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Not a thing?”

  “Except some folks don’t have no business driving on dirt roads, throwing dust and rocks all over people.”

  “How about a hundred and fifty a week and rent and utilities?”

  J.D. shifted the guitar on his lap and smiled. “That’s pert’ near the exact figure I had in mind.”

  “On the subject of jail?”

  “Yes sir?”

  “I was on the hard road when I was eighteen. I was in several other cans, too. I wasn’t a criminal, but I could have turned out to be one.”

  J.D. waited, unsure of what he was being told. “Yes sir, I’m listening.”

  “That’s all. You have a voice and an accent that are reminiscent of Jimmie Rodgers. That’s quite unusual,” Albert replied. “I hope you like it here.”

  CLETE PURCEL WAS the bane of his enemies and feared in New Orleans by pimps, drug dealers, cops on a pad, jackrollers, scam artists who victimized old people, and sexual predators of all stripes. Paradoxically, his closest friends included whiskey priests, strippers, stand-up cons, hookers on the spike, badass biker girls, button men, Shylocks, and mind-blown street people who claimed they had seen UFOs emerging from the waters of Lake Pontchartrain.

  His reputation for chaos and mayhem was legendary. In the men’s room of the New Orleans bus depot, he forced a contract killer to swallow a full dispenser of liquid soap. In the casino at the bottom of Canal, he blew a degenerate into a urinal with a firehose, then escaped the building by creating a bomb scare on the casino floor. He dropped a Teamster steward off a hotel balcony into a dry swimming pool. He filled a gangster’s hundred-thousand-dollar convertible with concrete. He hijacked an earth-grader from a construction site and drove it through the front of a palatial mansion owned by a member of the Giacano crime family. No, that is not an adequate description. He drove an earthmover through the entirety of the house, punching through the walls, grinding the furniture and tile and hardwood floors into rubble under the steel tracks. Not satisfied, he burst through the back of the house and destroyed the garages and parked cars and all the grounds, uprooting the hedges and trees, pushing the statuary and flagstone terrace into the swimming pool, finally exiting the property by exploding a brick wall onto the avenue.

  I could go on, but what’s the point? For Clete, life was a carnival, a theme park full of harlequins and unicorns, a reverse detox unit for people who took themselves seriously or thought too much about death. In an ambience of palm trees and pink sunrises on live-oak trees, of rainwater ticking onto the philodendron inside a lichen-stained courtyard, inside the smell of beignets and coffee and night-blooming flowers two blocks from the Café du Monde, he had lived the ethos of the libertine and the happy hedonist, pumping iron to control his weight, eating amounts of cholesterol-loaded food that would clog a sewer main, convincing himself that a vodka Collins had little more influence on his hypertension than lemonade.

  During all of it, he had never showed his pain and had never complained. The Big Sleazy was God’s gift to those who could not find peace in either the world or rejection of it. How could one refuse life inside a Petrarchan sonnet, particularly when it was offered to you without reservation or conditions by a divine hand?

  But the chink in Clete’s armor remained right below his heart, and the same knife went through it every time.

  It’s fair to say most of his girlfriends were nude dancers
, grifters, drunks, or relatives of mobsters. Most of them wore tattoos, and some had tracks on their arms or thighs. But the similarity in Clete’s lovers didn’t lie in their occupations or addictions. Almost all of them were incurable neurotics who went through romantic relationships like boxes of Kleenex. The more outrageous their behavior, the more Clete believed he had found kindred spirits.

  Ironically, it wasn’t the hookers and strippers and addicts who did him the most damage. It was usually a woman with a degree of normalcy and education in her background who wrapped him in knots. I suspect a psychologist would say Clete didn’t believe he was worthy of being loved. As a consequence, he would allow himself to be used and wounded by people whose own lack of self-knowledge didn’t allow them to see the depth of injury they inflicted upon him. Regardless, it was the quasi-normal ones who hung him out to dry.

  TWO DAYS AFTER our interview of Jamie Sue Wellstone, Clete began acting strange. “I’d better cancel out on our fishing trip today,” he said on our front porch after knocking at seven A.M.

  “What’s the problem?” I said.

  “Just some doodah I need to take care of in town,” he replied. He looked up at the sunlight breaking on the mountain, his cheeks bright with aftershave. His hair was freshly combed and clipped, his shoes buffed. He wore a pair of pressed slacks and a crisp new sport shirt.

  “How about some coffee?” I said.

  “I’d better run. Check with you later.”

  “What are you up to, Clete?”

  “Why do I always feel like you’re trying to staple my umbilical cord to the corner of your desk?”

  “When will you be back?” I asked.

  “Does anyone at your meetings ever say you have a control problem?”

  By three that afternoon, he had not returned. I tried his cell but got no answer. I drove three miles down the highway to the little service town of Lolo and saw his convertible parked outside the town’s only saloon. He was at the far end of the bar, hunched over his drink, perhaps twenty feet away from a table full of bikers who were half in the bag. The bikers were talking loudly, obviously getting Clete’s attention, although they were unaware of it.

  I sat down next to him and ordered a glass of ice and carbonated water. “What are you drinking?” I said.

  “A gin gimlet,” he replied. “It’s summertime, so I’m having a gin gimlet.”

  “You look like you’re shitfaced.”

  “I had the top down. It’s windburn. Dave, will you get off my back?”

  “It’s the Wellstone woman, isn’t it?” I said.

  “She called me on my cell. She wanted to retain me.”

  “For what?”

  “To find an old boyfriend. It’s not an unusual situation.” My eyes were boring into the side of his face. He took a sip from his drink and balled up a napkin. He looked over his shoulder at the bikers. “Can you guys hold down the noise?” he said.

  The bikers turned and stared at us. They were stone-faced and head-shaved, unsure which of us had spoken, their eyes taking our inventory.

  “We’re just having a drink here. How you guys doin’?” I said.

  They went back to their conversation, the tenor of their voices unchanged.

  “Has this got something to do with the man who was watching her in the saloon?” I said.

  “Jamie Sue used to-”

  “Jamie Sue?”

  “That’s what I said. Jamie Sue used to sing with a guy who went to prison. He tried to stop a pimp beating up a hooker outside a nightclub. He ended up putting a shiv in the guy,” Clete said. “She thinks he’s out now and maybe hanging around. She’s afraid her husband’s security people might bust him up.”

  “You believe that crap?”

  “Come on, Dave.”

  “You stop jerking me around. You tell me what happened today.”

  “I met her for an early lunch at this joint on Flathead Lake. We had a couple of drinks and took a boat ride. The water was blue as far as you could see, you know, like you’re out on the Pacific Ocean rather than a lake. Man, she looked fine, too, sitting on the bow of the boat with her gold hair blowing in the wind.”

  “Yeah, Jane Powell on a yacht. Get to it, Clete.”

  “We went back to the joint at the marina and had a couple more drinks. Then she put some money in the juke and asked me to dance. She felt so little inside my arms. Then I felt this wetness on my shirt. She was crying. She denied it, but she was crying.”

  I propped my elbow on the bar and pinched my temples. I hated to hear what was coming. In fact, I wished I had not gone looking for Clete and this time had let him take the fall on his own. “You got it on with her?” I said.

  “It’s like my libido was on autopilot. Five minutes away, there’s this motel on the point. We had the room on the end, looking over the water. Man, it was like I was twenty-five again.”

  “Oh, Clete,” I said, more to myself than to him.

  “We agreed afterwards it was a mistake. She was serious when she called about this Indian guy she used to sing with. It’s over between them, but she doesn’t want to see him hurt. I think she’s a good woman, Dave.”

  I wanted to punch him off the bar stool.

  Just then the bikers began laughing uproariously at a remark one of them had made about the drink waitress.

  “How about shutting the fuck up?” I said over my shoulder.

  “What’d you say?” one of them asked.

  “I said close your mouth. You’re disturbing a conversation here,” I replied, my face tight, my hand opening and closing on the bar.

  The entire bar became silent. Out on the highway, I could hear a tractor-trailer rig shifting down for the long haul over Lolo Pass.

  “Let it go, man,” one of the bikers said to the others. “They’re cops.”

  “The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide, bud, Clete Purcel and Dave Robicheaux, NOPD’s answer for every whore’s wet dream,” Clete said, winking at them. “Something to tell your grandkids about.”

  But none of it was funny.

  THAT NIGHT IN bed I told Molly what had happened.

  “Has he lost his mind?” she said.

  “He wants to be young again. He wants New Orleans to be like it was when we were beat cops. Scarlett O’Hara comes along and stokes him up and lets him think he’s Rhett Butler. She hit him with the perfect combo – beautiful victim protecting her ex-boyfriend needs help from chivalric PI.”

  “Stop making excuses for him. Clete went to bed with another man’s wife.”

  “That’s the point. It’s eating his lunch,” I said.

  I heard her sigh in the darkness. “I’m really sorry to hear this,” she said.

  “Maybe we should go back to New Iberia,” I said.

  “I think that’s a bad idea. We didn’t do anything wrong. We’re not going to let other people’s deeds or behavior make choices for us. Clete needs to get his goddamn act together.”

  “He’ll come around,” I said.

  “Who are you kidding? Clete’s at war with himself. It’s the only way he knows how to live.”

  She was right. Clete had slept with the wife of a mutilated war veteran, a man who had been burned in a tank. In Vietnam he had witnessed the death by fire of marines who had been trapped inside a burning armored vehicle. In his dreams, almost every third or fourth night of his life, he heard the sounds of ammunition belts popping in the heat and the voices of the men who couldn’t free the hatches on their vehicle. Now he had an extra set of knives turning inside his chest. Jamie Sue Wellstone may have been the succubus who provided the temptation and the opportunity, but the most pernicious agency in Clete’s life always remained the same. He would give up his life before he would willingly harm an animal or a friend or an innocent person, but daily he went about deconstructing himself without ever understanding that the child his father had irreparably injured was still living inside him. Clete had demons not even an exorcist would take on.

  Had Jamie S
ue Wellstone deliberately played him? I wasn’t sure. As though she had read my thoughts, Molly said, “I think you and Clete got too close to something. I think the Wellstones know exactly what they’re doing. I think you’re next, Dave.”

  “Not me. I’ve fought my last war.”

  She turned toward the wall and didn’t reply.

  THE NEXT MORNING, Friday, Clete’s troubles took on a different shade, in the form of Special Agent Alicia Rosecrans from the FBI. When she found no one home at Albert’s house, she drove her automobile up the dirt road to our front porch.

  She looked Amerasian and was dressed in a blue suit, white blouse, and conservative shoes, her dark hair touching her shoulders, her face narrow. She wore small wire-framed glasses that gave her a studious look, like that of a research librarian or a university professor devoted to an arcane subject that no one cared about. She said she wanted to speak to Clete Purcel. When I told her I didn’t know where he was, her eyes shifted off my face onto the interior of the cabin. She looked into my face again, not blinking, her expression impassive.

  “You’re a sheriff’s detective in Louisiana?” she said.

  “That’s correct.”

  “You don’t know where Mr. Purcel is?” she said, repeating her question.

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You were here in Montana when Sally Dio’s plane crashed into a mountainside on the res? You were here with Mr. Purcel?”

  “I wasn’t ‘with’ him. But yes, I was here in Montana when Sally caught the bus. It was a heartrending moment for everyone.”

  “The Bureau considers his death a homicide. I understand Dio’s men smashed your friend’s hand in a car door.”

  “Tell you what – a guy who can give you firsthand information on this works at the Wellstone ranch up in the Swan. His name is Lyle Hobbs. He did scut jobs for Sally when he wasn’t molesting children. You know the Wellstones, don’t you?”

  Her eyes took on a sharper intensity at the implication in my question. “I know who they are,” she said. “You think my visit here has some connection to them?”