Swan Peak

by James Lee Burke

  “You have some ID?”

  Troyce took out his wallet. It had been made by a convict, rawhide-threaded along the edges, the initials T.N. cut deep inside a big star. Troyce removed a celluloid-encased photo ID and set it on the bar.

  “This says you’re a prison guard,” the bartender said.

  “I’m that, among other things.”

  “This doesn’t give you jurisdiction in Montana. Maybe not a whole lot in Texas, either.”

  “You know that for a fact?”

  “I used to be a cop.”

  “I think your waitress friend in there has seen this fellow. I’m wondering if you have, too.”

  The bartender picked up the photo and tapped its edge on the bar, taking Troyce’s measure. The bartender’s pate was shiny with the oil he used on his few remaining strands of black hair, his shoulders almost too big for the immaculate oversize dress shirt he wore. His physicality was of a kind that sends other men definite signals, a quiet reminder that manners can be illusory and the rules of the cave still hold great sway in our lives.

  “A drifter was in here a couple of times. He was asking about Ms. Wellstone. He looked like this guy,” the bartender said.

  “You know where he is now?”

  “No.”

  “Does your waitress?”

  “She’s not my waitress.”

  Troyce smiled before he spoke. “I do something to put you out of joint?”

  “Yeah, you tried to let on you’re a cop. We’re done here.”

  ANYONE WHO HAS spent serious time in the gray-bar hotel chain is left with certain kinds of signatures on his person. Many hours of clanking iron on the yard produce flat-plated chests and swollen deltoids and rock-hard lats. Arms blanketed with one-color tats, called “sleeves,” indicate an inmate has been in the system a long time and is not to be messed with. Blue teardrops at the corner of the eye mean he is a member of the AB and has performed serious deeds for his Aryan brothers, sometimes including murder.

  Wolves, sissies, biker badasses, and punks on the stroll all have their own body language. So do the head-shaved psychopaths to whom everyone gives a wide berth. Like Orientals, each inmate creates his own space, avoids eye contact, and stacks his own time. Even an act as simple as traversing the yard can become iconic. What is sometimes called the “con walk” is a stylized way of walking across a crowded enclosure. The signals are contradictory, but they indicate a mind-set that probably goes back to Western civilization’s earliest jails. The shoulders are rounded, the arms held almost straight down (to avoid touching another inmate’s person), the eyes looking up from under the brow, an expression psychologists call “baboon hostility.” The step is exaggerated, the knees splayed slightly and coming up higher than they should, the booted feet consuming territory in almost surreptitious fashion.

  Every inmate in the institution is marked indelibly by it, and the mark is as instantly recognizable as were the numbers tattooed on the left forearms of the inmates in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. The difference is one of degree and intention. Time in the system prints itself on every aspect of an inmate’s behavior and manner.

  On Wednesday evening the weather was still cold, the air gray with rain, and at Albert’s ranch we could hear thunder inside the snow clouds that were piled along the crests of the Bitterroot Mountains. Albert asked me to take a ride with him to check on the new man he had hired to care for his horses in the next valley. He said the man’s name was J. D. Gribble.

  Gribble’s cabin was little more than one-room in size, heated by a woodstove that he also cooked on. He was unshaved and wore jeans without knees and only a T-shirt under his denim jacket. He smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and kept his cigarette papers and tobacco and a folder of matches in a pouch on the same table where he ate his food. In his ashtray were paper matches he had split with his thumbnail so he could get two lights out of one match.

  Albert and I drank coffee and condensed milk with the new man, then Albert went out to the barn to check on his horses. Through the window I could see lightning tremble on the sides of the hills, burning away the shadows from the brush and trees. The cabin windows were dotted with water, the interior snug and warm, still smelling of the venison the new man had cooked for his supper. In the corner was a twenty-two Remington pump, the bluing worn away, the stock badly nicked. He followed my eyes to the rifle.

  “I bought that off a guy in a hobo jungle for ten dollars,” he said.

  “Where you from, podna?” I asked.

  “Anyplace between my mother’s womb and where I’m at now,” he replied.

  “What were you down for?” I said.

  “Who says I was down for anything?”

  “I do,” I replied, my eyes on his.

  “It was a bad beef. But everybody in there has got the same complaint. So I don’t talk about it.”

  “Albert is a friend of mine,” I said.

  He was sitting right across the plank table from me. He picked up his coffee cup and drank from it, his hand fitted around the entirety of the cup. “I already told Mr. Hollister I ain’t necessarily proud of certain periods in my life. I had the impression he accepted my word and didn’t hold a man’s past against him.”

  “Is that your guitar?”

  He rubbed the calluses on his palms together, his eyes empty. He stared out the window into the darkness as though he had found no good words to use. “There ain’t nobody else living here. So I guess that makes it mine.”

  “It was just a question.”

  “I’ve had a lifetime supply of questions like that. They always come from the same people.”

  “Which people is that?” I asked.

  “The ones who want authority and power over others. The kind that ain’t got no lives of their own. The kind that cain’t leave other folks alone.”

  “That’s hard to argue with,” I said. “But here’s the problem, J.D. When a guy is still splitting matches, he hasn’t been out long. When a guy is on the drift from another state, he either went out max time or he jumped his parole. If he went out max time, he’s probably a hard case or a guy who was in for a violent crime. If he’s wanted on a parole violation, that’s another matter, one that’s not too cool, either.”

  “I got news for you, mister. I ain’t a criminal. And I ain’t interested in nobody’s jailhouse wisdom, either.”

  “Tell Albert I’m out in the truck. Thanks for the coffee,” I said.

  “You got a problem with me working here, tell Mr. Hollister. I was looking for a job when I found this one,” he said.

  There was a mean glint in his eye that probably did not serve his cause well. But I couldn’t fault him for it. It’s easy to come down on a man who doesn’t have two nickels in his pocket. Actually, I had to give J. D. Gribble credit. He hadn’t let me push him around. In truth, the crime of most men like him is that they were born in the wrong century. The Wellstones of the world are another matter. Maybe it was time to take a closer look at them and not scapegoat a drifter who was willing to risk his job in order to retain his dignity.

  IT WAS STILL raining Friday evening when I drove to a revival on the Flathead Indian Reservation, up in the Jocko Valley, a few miles from Missoula. The light was yellow and oily under the big tent, the surrounding countryside a dark green from the rains, clouds of steam rising from the Jocko River and the unmowed fields, the Mission Mountains looming ancient and cold against a sky where the sun did not set but died inside the clouds.

  I didn’t know what I’d expected to find. The congregants were both Indian and white working people, most of them poor and uneducated. Their form of religion, at least as I saw it in practice there, was of a kind that probably goes back to the earliest log churches in prerevolutionary America. South Louisiana is filled with it. In the last twenty-five years, it has spread like a quiet fire seeping through the grass in a forest full of birdsong. It offers power and magic for the disenfranchised. It also assures true believers that they will surv
ive an apocalyptical holocaust. It assures anti-Semites that Israel will be destroyed and that the Jews who aren’t wiped off the planet will convert to Christianity. More simply, it offers succor and refuge to people who are both frightened by the world and angry at the unfair hand it has dealt them.

  I sat on a folding chair at the back of the tent, a patina of wood chips under my shoes, ground fog now puffing out of the darkness. The minister wore a beard that was barbered into lines that ran to the corners of his mouth and around his chin. His navy blue suit looked tailored, snug on his hips and narrow shoulders; his silver vest glittered like a riverboat gambler’s. His enunciation was booming, the accent faintly southern without properly being such, the words sometimes unctuous and empathetic, sometimes barbed and accusatory, like the flick of a small whip on a sensitive part of the soul. The congregants hung on every word as though he were speaking to each of them individually.

  There was no overt political message, but the allusions to abortion and homosexual marriage threaded their way in and out of his narration. A woman with pitted cheeks and black hair cut in bangs was sitting on the edge of her chair next to me. She wore jeans with cactus flowers sewn on the flared bottoms and a black-and-red cowboy shirt with white piping below the shoulders and around the pockets. Her chin was lifted as though she were trying to see over the heads of the people in front of her. I offered to change chairs with her.

  “That’s all right, I was looking for my friend,” she said. “There he is. I thought he had run off on me.”

  She smiled when she spoke, her eyes lingering on the opposite side of the tent, where a tall man wearing a nylon vest and a coned-up white straw hat and a pocket watch with a fob strung across his stomach was watching the crowd. I saw the tall man bend over and show what appeared to be a photograph to a couple of people sitting at the end of a row. A moment later, he showed the photograph to others. One of the ushers had taken notice of him and was staring intently at the tall man’s back. The usher happened to be Jamie Sue Wellstone’s driver, the man who seemed to have no other name than Quince.

  Take a chance, I thought. “Is your friend a cop?” I asked the woman next to me.

  “Why you want to know?” she said.

  “He was showing a photograph to some people. That’s what cops do sometimes, don’t they?”

  “Troyce looks like a cop. But he’s not. How long do these things last?”

  “Depends on how broke the preacher is.”

  She gave me a second look. Then she looked at me again. I could almost hear the wheels turning in her head. “You just happen to be passing by and decide to get out of the rain?”

  “A guy has got to do something for kicks.”

  “That line is from a movie.”

  “Is that a fact?” I said.

  “Yeah, Rebel Without a Cause. These kids who hate each other are about to drive stolen cars to the edge of a cliff to see who’ll jump out first. But James Dean and this guy named Buzz become friends, and so it doesn’t make any sense for them to try and kill each other anymore. So James Dean says something like ‘Why are we doing this?’ Buzz says, ‘You got to do something for kicks, man.’”

  While she told her story, her eyes were fixed steadily on mine. They were brown with a tinge of red in them, or maybe that was the distortion of the light under the tent. But she was pretty in an unusual way, innocent in the way that people at the very bottom of our society can be innocent when they have nothing more to lose and hence are not driven by ambition and the guile that often attends it.

  “But you are,” she said.

  “I’m what?”

  “What you said.”

  “I’m a cop?”

  “I can always tell. But you look like a nice guy just the same.” She turned her attention back to the stage. “That’s Jamie Sue Wellstone? If my boobs would stand up like that, I wouldn’t be singing in a backwoods shithole under a piece of canvas in a rainstorm. I had mine tattooed, you know, chains of flowers, that kind of crap? They never recovered. They just flounce around now. What a drag.”

  The people in front of us turned and stared as though the crew from a spaceship had just entered the tent.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  “Candace Sweeney. When I was a roller-derby skater, I got called Candy. But my name is Candace. What’s yours?”

  “Dave Robicheaux.”

  “A cop, right?”

  “There’re worse things.”

  “See, I can always tell,” she said.

  Jamie Sue Wellstone began to sing “Amazing Grace.” Her rendition of it was probably the most beautiful I had ever heard. I believe its author, John Newton, would have wept along with the congregants in that unlikely setting of a rain-darkened tent in western Montana, far from an eighteenth-century slave ship midstream in the Atlantic Passage. I believe even the wretched souls in Newton’s cargo hold would have forgiven Newton his sins against them if they had known how their suffering would translate into the song Jamie Sue was singing. Or at least that was the emotion that she seemed able to create in her listeners.

  The crowd loved her. Their love was not necessarily spiritual, either. To deny her erotic appeal would be foolish. Her evening gown looked like pink sherbet running down her body. Her hands and pale arms seemed small in contrast to the big Martin guitar that hung from her neck; it somehow made her diminutive figure and the loveliness of her voice even more mysterious and admirable. In an act of collective faith, the congregants both elevated her and reclaimed her as one of their own. Her wealth was not only irrelevant; that she had turned her back on it to join with her own people in prayer made her even more deserving of their esteem. Her songs were of droughts, dust storms, mine blowouts, skies peppered with locusts, shut-down sawmills, and crowning forest fires whose heat could vacuum the oxygen from a person’s lungs. How could she know these things unless she or her family had lived through them?

  When the congregants saw Jesus’ broken body on the cross, they saw their own suffering rather than his. When they said he died for them, they meant it literally. In choosing to die as he did, rejected and excoriated by the world, he deliberately left behind an emblematic story of their ordeal as well as his.

  When the audience looked up at the sequins glittering on Jamie Sue’s pink gown, when they saw the beauty of her face in the stage lights and heard the quiver in her voice, they experienced a rush of gratitude and affirmation and love that was akin to the love they felt for the founder of their faith. Idolatry was the word for it. But to them it was little different from the canonization of saints.

  Their tragedy lay in the fact that most of them were good people who possessed far greater virtue and courage than those who manipulated and controlled their lives.

  At intermission, the ushers poked broomsticks up into the canvas to dump the pooled rainwater over the sides of the tent. The air was damp and cold, the Mission Mountains strung with clouds. In the distance I could see a waterfall frozen inside a long crevasse that disappeared into timber atop a dark cliff. The people around us were eating sandwiches they had brought from home, and drinking coffee from thermos jugs. I told Candace Sweeney I was surprised no basket had been passed.

  “They don’t ask money from folks here. If you don’t like it here, go somewhere else,” said a man in strap overalls sitting behind us.

  Candace turned in her chair. “Why don’t you learn some manners, you old fart?” she said.

  But I wasn’t listening to the exchange between Candace and the belligerent farmer. Instead, a big Indian girl sitting next to him had captured my attention. She wore a purple-and-gold football jersey embossed with a silver grizzly bear. She realized I was staring at her.

  “I was admiring your cross,” I said.

  “This?” she said, clutching the small cross with her fingers. It was made of dark wood and hung from her neck on a leather cord.

  “Yes, do you know where I could get one?”

  “I don’t know which st
ore they come from. I got mine at Campus Ministries.”

  “Pardon?”

  “At the Campus Ministries summer training session. Everybody in Sister Jamie’s campus outreach program gets one.”

  “Did you know Seymour Bell?”

  “Who?” she said.

  I repeated the name, my eyes on hers.

  “I don’t know who he is,” she said.

  “His girlfriend was Cindy Kershaw.”

  “Those kids who were killed? I read about them in the paper. But I didn’t know them.”

  “I think Seymour wore a cross just like yours. I’m almost sure of it.”

  I could see the confusion and nervousness in her face. “I don’t know what you’re saying. Sister Jamie gave me this cross. I think you can buy them at that religious store in Missoula.”

  “Why are you bothering my granddaughter? Who the hell are you?” said the man in overalls.

  “Nobody is talking to you,” Candace Sweeney said to him.

  It was not the way I wanted to conduct an interview. “Thanks for the information,” I said to the Indian girl.

  But it was about to get worse. Candace Sweeney’s friend, who had been showing a photograph to congregants on the opposite side of the tent, reoccupied his chair, then leaned forward so he could see past Candace and look at me. A lateral indentation, a concave wound of some kind, ran from below his right eye to the corner of his mouth, and the muscles didn’t work right when he tried to smile. He still seemed oblivious to the fact that his every movement was being watched by the man named Quince. “How you doing?” he asked.

  “Pretty good,” I said.

  “You a fan of Ms. Wellstone, too?”

  “I’ve heard a couple of her songs. I always thought she was pretty good.”

  I could see the edge of the photograph sticking out of his shirt pocket, and what appeared to be gauze and white tape at the top of his chest. He slipped a toothpick in his mouth and seemed to take my measure. His hands were broad, his fingers splayed on his knees, the backs of his forearms covered with fine, reddish-blond hair. Upon first glance, he seemed likable, his eyes crinkling at the corners, his trim physique and neat appearance suggestive of a confident man who had no agenda and didn’t need to prove himself to others. “You from down south?” he asked.