Swan Peak

by James Lee Burke

  “How about the girl?” I asked.

  She stared out the front window of the shop. There was a line of parking meters along the curb, and she seemed to be re-creating a scene that had taken place there. “The boy came inside. I’m not sure about the girl, though. A girl who looked like this one was with him. She was waiting for him by a big black car. She was mad about something. I remember thinking it was a shame a girl that pretty and young should have such a scowl on her face. I thought maybe it was the brightness of the day and the light hurt her eyes. But that wasn’t it. She was angry about something.”

  “The boy came in by himself and bought the cross?” I said.

  “No, a man was with him. I didn’t care for him. He had an odor.”

  “An odor?”

  “Like he’d been working outside and should have taken a shower. Or maybe he had been riding too long in a hot car, I don’t know. His clothes were pressed and clean, but he hadn’t showered. They had words outside.”

  “Who did?”

  “The girl and the man. She walked off, and the boy went after her. I think the man followed them in the car and they all went off together. I’m not sure.”

  “Did the driver have a beard?”

  “I don’t remember. He wore a blue suit and a white shirt without a tie. It was too hot a day to wear a navy blue suit. I think he even had a vest on.”

  “What kind of car was he driving?”

  “I didn’t pay attention. I think it was a dark color.”

  I thanked her and left my business card on the counter, and Molly and I walked back toward the courthouse. I couldn’t sort out the information the owner of the religious store had given me. In truth, I had wanted her to tell me Jamie Sue Wellstone or her husband or brother-in-law had either come into the store or phone-ordered the crosses. I had grown to dislike the Wellstones for many reasons, maybe because they were rich and powerful and arrogant, maybe in part because Jamie Sue had dragged my friend Clete Purcel into her life. Regardless, I didn’t like them, and I wanted to bring them down. I doubted there was any tie between the Baptist Bible camp in Spokane and the cross Seymour Bell had worn. The big question was the identity of the driver who had accompanied Seymour into the store. Was it Quince? He didn’t seem like the kind of man Cindy Kershaw and Seymour would be attracted to.

  “Maybe Seymour Bell’s purchase of the cross didn’t have anything to do with the Wellstones and their religious crusade,” I said.

  “It did,” Molly said.

  “Why?”

  “People don’t buy a wood cross on a leather cord for ornamental reasons. The cross is important to the person who wears it because it was earned. It’s not a piece of jewelry. It’s a badge of merit.”

  I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at her. “Wait here a minute,” I said.

  The bell above the door rang again when I reentered the religious store. “Who paid for the cross, ma’am?” I asked.

  She thought about it. “The man,” she said. “His wallet was on a chain, the kind that loops around into the back pocket, even though he was wearing a suit. He counted out three one-dollar bills and made me give him a receipt.”

  “Do you keep copies of your receipts?”

  “Not for walk-in purchases like that. I tore it off the cash register and handed it to him.”

  “You’ll call me if he comes back, won’t you?”

  “I’m not sure I will. When something like this happens, I think the devil is involved in it. I think it’s a mistake to believe otherwise. I think it’s a mistake to put your hand in it.”

  This was the best source of information I had found so far regarding the origins of Seymour Bell’s wood cross.

  When Molly and I got back to the courthouse, the sheriff told me the SUV I had asked him to run was registered in the name of Troyce Nix, a supervisory employee at a contract penitentiary in West Texas. Joe Bim said I could call a deputy sheriff by the name of Jeff Rawlings if I wanted more information. “You think this fellow is worth all this trouble?” he asked.

  “Probably not,” I said.

  He gave me the use of a spare office, and I called an extension at a sheriff’s department in a rural county east of the Van Horn Mountains. Jeff Rawlings explained that he had been one of four investigative sheriff’s deputies who had interviewed Troyce Nix at his bedside in an El Paso hospital. At first Rawlings was taciturn and noncommittal, and I had the feeling he did not want to revisit his experience with Nix. “Has he got hisself in some kind of trouble up there?” he asked.

  “I met him at a revival while I was investigating a double homicide. He seemed to be looking for somebody. I’d like to find out who.”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “I had the sense he doesn’t easily share information.”

  “Nix is on paid medical leave from a contract prison. He’s also a major stockholder in the prison. So he might be on leave a long time. He has a hunting camp not far from the prison. He had a convict under his supervision at the camp when he said a tramp come out of the bedroom closet with a shank and cut him up. According to Nix, the convict was digging postholes when it happened. Nix says the tramp must have come in from the highway and was robbing the house when Nix and the convict drove up. The tramp hid in the closet, and when Nix opened the door, the tramp sliced him up. The convict took off with the truck, and Nix called 911 on his cell. That’s the story.”

  “You’re not convinced that’s the way it went down?”

  “There was blood all over the bedroom. He was lying in a ball on the floor when the paramedics got there. But there was also blood behind the house. He says he went outside and tried to get the convict to help him, but the convict had took off.”

  “What’s Nix’s background?”

  “I was afraid you’d get to that.”

  I waited, but he didn’t speak. “He’s an ex-felon?” I said.

  “Nix worked as an MP at Abu Ghraib. It got him kicked out of the army. So he got into jailing on a privatized basis. I hope he’s up there enjoying y’all’s alpine vistas. I hope he ain’t up there for other purposes.”

  “Like what?”

  “No comment.”

  “Was the convict under his supervision ever caught?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “You think he’s the guy who cut up Nix?”

  “There’s no motivation. The boy was half-trusty and probably gonna make parole at his next hearing. Every write-up Nix put in his jacket was positive. For me, the convict as suspect don’t add up. But nothing about Nix does. If you figure it out, give me another call.”

  “What’s the background on the convict?”

  “He was down for grand auto, but the way I understand it, his real crime was stopping a pimp from beating up a chippie in a parking lot. The pimp happened to be the nephew of the meanest bucket of goat piss to ever sit on the Texas bench. I wrote up my report on all this and shut the drawer on it. I don’t think Nix belongs in law enforcement. I don’t think the kid belonged in a contract jail. But I don’t get to make the rules. Anything else?”

  “What’s the escaped convict’s name?”

  “Jimmy Dale Greenwood. Some of the other cons called him Jimmy Git-It-and-Go ’cause he was a guitar-picking man.”

  JAMIE SUE WELLSTONE and her husband kept separate bedrooms, not at her request but at his. Leslie Wellstone was an insomniac and wandered the corridors and downstairs rooms of his enormous house in slippers and robe for hours on end, sometimes reading under a lamp, sometimes fixing warm milk that he didn’t drink. Perhaps his life of sleeplessness was due to his war injuries. Perhaps it had other causes. Whatever the cause, he never discussed it. Leslie Wellstone never complained and never discussed personal matters of any kind.

  He was undemanding in his attitude toward Jamie Sue. She could buy anything she wanted and go anywhere she wanted. The best care possible was available for her child. Her driver, Quince, would probably lay down his life f
or her. A wave of her hand, the tinkle of a bell, a touch of her finger on the house speaker system could summon any type of domestic or security personnel she wanted. There were implicit understandings about her and her husband’s sexual congress and the number of times a month they entered into it, but it was never he who initiated it. She left her bed and came to his of her own accord, usually in the dark, just before sunrise, when she woke hot and disturbed and filled with longing from a dream she would never tell him about. She didn’t hold back when she made love with Leslie, but she did it with her eyes closed, thinking of the man in the dream, thinking perhaps just momentarily of the terrible trade-off that had made her despise herself and wonder if her soul was forfeit.

  Then she would lie beside him, her naked body damp under the sheets, his hand in hers, and try to convince herself there was redemption in charity and that maybe even in committing sin, she had brought a degree of happiness into a blighted man’s life.

  It was in moments like these that she saw into another corner of Leslie’s soul. She wondered if, inside his veneer of gentlemanly manners and self-deprecating humor, he had found ways to mock and injure her. Worse, she wondered if his cynical statements were made with forethought and in contempt of her poor education and background. In the predawn hours of the morning after the revival on the res, she had gone into Leslie’s bedroom and undressed and gotten in bed beside him. After they had completed their particular form of lovemaking, he had disentangled himself from her and lay quietly in the gloom, staring at the ceiling, his breath as audible as wind whistling in a dry pipe.

  “Is everything all right, Leslie?” she asked.

  “I was curious about your rotund friend.”

  “Who?”

  “Purcel is the name, isn’t it? I bet he’s a ton of fun to bounce around with.”

  She started to speak, but he turned on his side and touched his finger to her lips. “I have a question about the way you keep your eyes shut even though the room is dark.”

  “Leslie, don’t.”

  “Tell me, when you’re going at it, really outdoing yourself, do you secretly feel you’re on top of a giant crustacean?” he said.

  Then she knew that the man lying next to her believed in and respected absolutely nothing, and, if confronted with his nihilism, would probably ask her why it had taken her so long to figure that out.

  AT NOON SHE had Quince drive her and her son to the café on Swan Lake. She carried her son on her shoulder and got a high chair from the waitress and set the little boy inside it, then ordered a grilled cheese sandwich for him and a buffalo burger for herself. After Quince ordered, Jamie Sue called the waitress back and asked her to bring a gin gimlet from the saloon next door. “Would you like something from the bar, sir?” the waitress said to Quince.

  “Just the food I ordered. Water is good,” he replied, tapping his nail on the water glass that was already full.

  After the waitress was gone, Jamie Sue said, “You can have a beer if you like.”

  “Thank you just the same, Miss Jamie.”

  “I’ve never seen you drink.”

  “I’m hired to drive y’all. That means with a clear head. You know that alcohol stays in the bloodstream for three weeks?”

  “No, I didn’t know that. But you’re a loyal employee, Quince.”

  “That’s a fine compliment coming from you, Miss Jamie.”

  She let the personal nature of his remark pass and looked out onto the lake. She could see the wind cutting long V’s in the surface, and Swan Peak rising into the clouds, blue-black against the sky, as sharply delineated as the edges of a broken razor blade. Her gimlet glass was frosted with cold when the waitress brought it, and she drank it empty in three swallows, the gin sliding down inside her like an icicle starting to melt. The food had not been placed in the serving window that separated the kitchen from the counter area, and she called the waitress back and ordered another gimlet.

  “Miss Jamie, I heard about you in Miss’sippi, long before I went to work for the Wellstones. I listened to your music on a station up in Tennessee. The jukebox up at the café had a couple of your songs on it,” Quince said. “People played them all the time. People said you were as good as Martina McBride.”

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Liquor always messed me up. I’d have these blackouts and wake up with spiders crawling all over the room. I’d have memories that didn’t make any sense. That’s what I was trying to say. A lady like you don’t need to-”

  “You shouldn’t worry about me, Quince. We’re all doing fine here. Has Mr. Leslie said something about me? Are you troubled in some way?”

  His face blanched. “No ma’am, I mean he didn’t say anything to me. I ain’t a bedpost, though. I hear things. I’m supposed to look out for you.”

  Quince kept talking, trying to undo his ineptitude, but she heard nothing else of what he said, as though his lips were moving beyond a piece of soundproof glass. The waitress brought her the gimlet, then came back with their plates. Jamie Sue cut the little boy’s grilled cheese sandwich into small strips that he began eating with his fingers, smiling with a mouthful of toasted bread and yellow cheese. She let her own food grow cold on the plate and drank from her gimlet and looked out on the lake and thought about a scene many years ago in a little town in Texas at the bottom of the old Chisholm Trail.

  It was a historical place in ways that nobody cared about. The most dangerous gunman in the West, John Wesley Hardin, had grown up in Cuero, right down the road. Bill Dalton’s gang used to hide out there after robbing trains and banks. The biggest herds of cattle ever assembled were put together there and trailed across the Red River, through Indian territory, all the way to the railhead at Wichita. The Sutton-Taylor feud, probably the worst outbreak of violence in the postbellum South, began with the rope-dragging and murder of a cowboy on her grandfather’s ranch.

  In reality, she did not care about these things. When she thought about the town where she had grown up, she thought in terms of images and faces rather than events, of kind words spoken to her, of a time when she believed the world was an orderly and safe place where she was loved and one day would be rewarded because she was born pretty in a way that very few little girls were pretty.

  Her father, an oil-field roustabout who was barely five feet five, had left one lung at Bougainville and had fixed the other one up with two packs of Camels a day. But he and his wife, a woman born without sight, had opened up a hamburger joint and for five years had made a living out of it and a truck patch they irrigated with water they hand-carried in buckets from a dammed-up creek. Each noon during the summer months, except Sunday, when they attended an Assembly of God church, Jamie Sue’s mother fixed her grilled cheese sandwiches in the café kitchen and let her eat them with the customers at the counter. Every day she drank a Triple X or a Hires root beer with her sandwich, and was the darling of the cowboys and pipeliners and long-haul drivers who frequented the café. Then her father took his last trip to the cancer ward at the U.S. Navy hospital in Houston and died while smoking a cigarette in the bathroom.

  The hamburger joint became a video store, and Jamie Sue and her mother lived on welfare and the charity of her grandfather, who owned the remnants of a dust-blown ranch that was blanketed by grasshoppers and filled with tumbleweed and dead mesquite trees. The grandfather cooked on a woodstove and had no plumbing. If a person wanted to bathe, he did it in the horse tank. If he wanted to relieve himself, he did not go to the outhouse, or at least one that would be recognized as such. The “outhouse” consisted of a plank stretched across two pine stumps. The disposal system was a shovel propped against a scrub oak.

  In revisiting her childhood, Jamie Sue did not dwell on the years she had lived at her grandfather’s. Instead, she tried to remember the grilled cheese sandwiches that she ate in her parents’ café, and the attention and love she saw daily in the faces of their customers.

  The only problem with traveling down memory lane was that
you didn’t always get to chart your course or destination. In her sleep, she sometimes heard grasshoppers crawling drily over one another on a rusted window screen, matting their bodies into the wire mesh, blotting out the stars and shutting down the airflow. She saw herself pulling wood ticks off her skin and sometimes out of her scalp, where they had embedded their heads and grown fat on her blood. The admiring patrons of the café were gone, and the only men who took a personal interest in her were the occasional caseworkers from the welfare agency who, while checking off items on a clipboard, asked her if she bathed regularly and whether she had seen worms in her stool.

  “I’m going to the restroom. Would you watch Dale for me, please?” she said to Quince.

  “Yes ma’am, I’ll make sure he chomps it all down. He needs to drink all his milk to be strong, too. Don’t you, little fella? You all right, Miss Jamie?”

  “Of course I am, Quince. What a silly question,” she replied.

  When she went into the restroom, she felt the floor tilt sideways. Was it the gin on an empty stomach, or was she coming down with something? No, the gin was not the problem. She felt worse when she didn’t drink it. So how could the problem be connected to her alcohol intake or the time of day when she drank it? If Leslie had not spoken so cynically to her, she wouldn’t have needed the drink. She didn’t crave alcohol, she was not addicted to it. It served to anesthetize her temporarily, but what else was she supposed to do? Excoriate herself because her husband talked to her like she was white trash and stupid on top of it?

  Years ago another dancer at the topless club where she used to work started attending A.A. meetings for reasons Jamie Sue didn’t understand. As far as she knew, her friend did a few lines now and then and, on her day off, might drink a few daiquiris on a rich man’s boat, but she wasn’t a lush or a junkie. When Jamie Sue told the friend that, seeking to reassure her, the friend replied that the chief symptoms of alcoholism were guilt about the past and anxiety about the future, that the booze and the coke and the weed were only symptoms.

  Those words never quite went away.