Swan Peak

by James Lee Burke

  The three laughed uproariously, so hard the driver lost his concentration and hit a pothole that bounced Candace into the air.

  “Here’s the rest of it,” the blond man said. “You know who the broad was?”

  “Your mother?” the driver said.

  “Jamie Sue Wellstone. Except that wasn’t her name then. Small world, huh? I saw her sing later. Same broad, still selling the same tits. I wonder if Mr. Wellstone knows her history.”

  Candace realized the men had not been referring to Leslie Wellstone when they had mentioned the geek. That thought filled her with a new fear, one that made her insides turn to water. In her mind’s eye, she saw a faceless silhouette, a black-suited, humped, and spiritually deformed creature whose existence was confined to nightmares and who was supposed to disappear at first light. When the van hit another pothole – this time with such violence that the frame actually slammed into the ground – she was jolted once more into the air. A moan broke from her throat, muffling against the tape.

  “What’s going on back there?” the driver asked.

  “Nothing,” the blond man said.

  “No more rough stuff,” the driver said. “It ain’t our way. We dump ’em, and then this place is a memory.”

  “What if Mr. Wellstone says different?” the blond man said.

  “This state injects,” the driver said. “We didn’t sign on to ride the needle for fraternity guys who can’t manage their poontang. We eighty-six the sticks, and we’re down and outbound for Houston-town. Twenty-four hours from now, we’re gonna be drinking margaritas and eating Mexican food at Pappasito’s.”

  “What do you think the geek has got planned?” the blond man said.

  “Show some respect, Layne,” the man in the front passenger seat said.

  Through the crack in the tape, Candace saw him gesture at her and Jimmy Dale.

  AT THE NORTHERN end of Flathead Lake, in the town called Bigfork, Clete turned east and drove through a break in the mountains. Just before we reached a bridge at the Swan River, we saw the dirt road that accessed the peninsula on the west side of Swan Lake. The sun had broken through the rain clouds in the west and was the reddish-yellow of an egg yolk. But another front was moving toward us, a separate weather system, this one ugly and mean. It was gray and swirling with rain, pelting the lake, and when we drove onto the dirt road, the trees on either side of us were already bending in the wind, shredding cascades of pine needles across the windshield. The light had almost disappeared inside the timber, and the front end of the Caddy was bouncing hard in the potholes, patterning the windshield with more mud than the wipers could clean off.

  “I feel like I’m sitting on sandbags in a six-by, waiting for Sir Charles to pop one through my windshield,” Clete said. A downed limb broke in half under a front tire and clanged against the oil pan. “My transmission’s not up to this. Check your cell.”

  “What for?” I said.

  “To call Alicia again. I think we might be firing in the well. I think Jamie Sue might have given us a bum lead. My engine is about to come off the mounts.”

  “She didn’t exactly give us a lead.”

  “Want to explain that?”

  “I asked if her husband had a private place where he went. This is the only place she could think of.”

  “That’s it?” he said.

  “That’s it.”

  “I thought I had obsessions. You know what your problem is? You’re like those biblical fundamentalists. They believe if one part of the Bible is not literally correct, the rest of it is no good, either. Except with you, it’s people. You got to prove everybody is on the square, or the whole human race is no good.”

  “Pretty sharp thinking, Clete. Except it’s not me who couldn’t keep his johnson in his pants when he met Jamie Sue Wellstone.”

  He laughed, looking at me sideways, the Caddy dipping into a huge hole, shuddering the frame, throwing both of us against our seat straps. “What was I supposed to do? Hurt her feelings?”

  “Don’t ever go into analysis,” I said.

  “Why not?”

  “Your psychiatrist will shoot himself.”

  But he was smiling at me, not listening, not caring what I said one way or another, indifferent to all the minutiae that had gone into the ebb and flow of our lives, remembering only the bond we had shared over the decades, the wounds we had suffered and survived together, the flags under which we had fought and the causes we had served, many of which were no longer considered of import by others.

  “We painted our names on the wall, didn’t we?” he said.

  “You’d better believe it, Cletus,” I replied.

  I looked through the back window and thought I saw headlights glimmering in the trees. Then they disappeared. The rain swept westward across the timber, bending the canopy, channeling serpentine rivulets in the road.

  We were high enough that I could make out lights on the far side of Swan Lake, like beacons inside ocean fog. I suspected the lights came from the nightclub on the shore, but I couldn’t be sure. I thought of the photograph of Bugsy Siegel and Virginia Hill mounted on the wall behind the club’s bar, and I wondered why such criminals beckoned to us from the past, why they were able to lay such a strong romantic claim upon us. Was it because secretly we wanted to emulate them, to possess their power, to burn that brightly inside the mist, incandescent as they pursued all the trappings of the American dream, just as we did? Was it because the art deco world of 1940s Hollywood and the sweet sewer it represented were as much a part of our culture as the graves of Shiloh?

  Clete rolled down his window halfway, and the rain blew inside. “Listen,” he said.

  “What?” I said, waking from my reverie.

  “I thought I heard a piece of heavy equipment working. You hear it?”

  “No,” I replied.

  “Maybe I’m going nuts. I still hear that motherfucker who tried to set fire to me.”

  I rolled down my window and looked at our headlight beams bouncing off the tree trunks, but I could not see anything unusual or hear any sound except the wind sharking through the canopy and a solitary peal of thunder across the sky.

  JAMIE SUE COULD not understand her own thoughts. She had stayed in the barn, her cell phone in her jeans, grooming the horses, listening to the rip of thunder across the skies and the rain mixed with hail that was clattering on the barn’s metal roof. Leslie or one of the servants carrying out his orders had removed all the vehicle keys from the hooks in the mudroom. His and Ridley’s security personnel had tripled in number in the last week, men who dressed neatly and were barbered and clean-shaved and were deferential but, she guessed, also more professionally criminal than either Quince Whitley or Lyle Hobbs. In retrospect, Lyle seemed like an amateur, perhaps another Judas for sale, blowing the compound with whiskey on his breath and a tic in his eyes like that of a crystal addict, but by comparison, a bumbling amateur.

  Jamie Sue had never understood why Leslie had hired Lyle. It seemed to have something to do with their common experience in Vegas or Reno, or other marginal enterprises the Wellstones dabbled in as part of the price they paid for doing business in what they considered a corrupt culture.

  She had taken little Dale into the barn with her and unrolled a plastic tarp on the floor for him to play on. But the two of them were trapped, with no means of escape, and she had no idea where Jimmy Dale was or the fate that might be awaiting him if he had been abducted by Ridley and Leslie’s goons. She felt a terrible sense of urgency, as though she were drowning in full view of others and no one on the bank could hear her voice. Or was that just her melodramatic daytime-television mentality kicking into gear?

  No, time was running out, and not simply on this situation on this particular Saturday in the summer of 2007, she thought.

  The choices she had made over the years all had a consequence and a cost, and the bills were coming due. She should have toughed it out by herself when Jimmy Dale went to jail, staying loyal to
him and accepting privation as her lot, just as her blind mother and disabled father had. What would have been the worst thing to happen if she had gone it on her own? Second-class-celebrity status as an aging honky-tonk performer? Living in a trailer? Putting up with over-the-hill, drunk truck drivers who wanted her to sing “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (And Loud, Loud Music)”?

  The list of things she should not have done was long. She shouldn’t have married her community-college English professor and used his alcoholism to sue him in divorce court for almost everything he owned. She shouldn’t have posed as a religious woman and deceived the crowds who flocked to Sonny Click’s revivals. She shouldn’t have used her sexuality to manipulate uneducated family men who trusted her. She shouldn’t have used Leslie, and she shouldn’t have pretended she had married him in order to care for Dale.

  It was the last thought that bothered her most. Everything she’d done had been a justification for her own agenda. She had even used her little boy as an excuse, when in reality, she had loved all the benefits of marriage to a man like Leslie Wellstone – the limos and luxury cars and private planes, the palatial estates, the servants who attended her every need, the awe and respect and diffidence she created with her presence wherever she went. In the meantime, she had lost her music, the one element in her life she had treated as a votive gift and had not compromised for the sake of either celebrity or commercial success. In her earlier career, she had continued to sing in the traditions of Skeeter Davis and Kitty Wells while everybody else in Nashville was going uptown, then somewhere along the way, she had forgotten who she was and what she was and had taken the gift for granted and used it to manipulate people into voting against their own interests.

  She remembered a statement that Keith Richards once made regarding a famous R amp;B musician whose hostility to his own audience hid just beneath his skin: “Chuck’s tragedy is he doesn’t realize how much joy he brings to other people.”

  Her head was dizzy, her hands dry and hard to close.

  She began brushing a mahogany-black gelding in his stall, raking burrs out of his mane and forelock, rubbing him under the jaw, touching the graceful line and smoothness of his neck, talking in a reassuring voice in his ear. The gelding was four now but still hot-wired and subject to spooking and rearing in dry mustard weed, and neither Ridley nor Leslie would ride him. But Jamie Sue could and did, sometimes without a saddle, using only a hackamore to rein him.

  Ownership of a fine horse came with ability, not legal title, Jimmy Dale always said. He said no one owned the sunrise or the rain, or mesas and mountains, or the bluebonnets of South Texas. Your claim to ownership of the earth was based on the six feet of dirt that went into your face. The rest of it was a grand playground that God had given to all His children. At least that was what Jimmy Dale and his peyote-soaked friends said.

  She wondered if her thoughts amounted to what a theologian would call contrition. She decided they probably did not. But perhaps they were a start.

  She picked up Dale from the tarp and set him like a clothespin on the gelding’s back, keeping her arm around his waist to steady him. “I’m going to get you your own pony one day,” she said. “Maybe back in Texas, where your grandma and granddaddy used to live and your mama grew up.”

  “Just when do you plan on doing that, Jamie Sue?” a voice said behind her.

  She turned and looked into her husband’s face. “What have you done with Jimmy Dale?” she asked.

  “I haven’t done anything with him. I’ve never even had the pleasure of meeting him. But tell me, why is it you think I might have harmed him? You weren’t planning on going somewhere with him today, were you? You haven’t been screwing him in the bushes, have you?”

  She had stepped into his trap. “I’ve never understood your mean-spiritedness, Leslie. Your brother orders things done to his enemies, but only when he’s forced to. You enjoy offending and hurting people just for the sake of hurting them. Maybe the war did that to you. Maybe it’s because you married someone who doesn’t love you. But you’re a sad man and an object of pity. Not because of your deformity, either. You’re pitied by others because of what you are, and that’s what you’ve never understood about yourself.”

  She lifted Dale off the horse and set his weight on her hip, momentarily shifting her attention away from Leslie. When she looked at him again, his head was tilted sideways, the shriveled skin alongside one cheek and his neck stretched free of wrinkles, like a large piece of smooth rubber.

  “I have the sense you’re at a point of decision in your life,” he said. “Standing at the crossroads, wading across the Jordan, that kind of thing. You know, Scarlett O’Hara gazing out upon the wastes?”

  “What decision? How can I make decisions? You’ve fixed it so I can’t go anywhere.”

  “Would you like to go for a late dinner tonight? I’ll have Harold drive us in the limo to Bigfork or Yellow Bay.”

  “Who lives inside you, Leslie? Who are you?”

  “Not interested in dinner tonight? The lake is lovely when the rain is falling on it. Last chance, Jamie Sue. I wouldn’t ignore the importance of the choice you’re about to make. There are maybe three or four choices we make in our lives that determine our fate. A random turn off a freeway into the wrong neighborhood, buying a burnt-out sweet-potato patch that sits on top of an oil pool, taking off the night chain because we trust the Fuller Brush man. You took a chance and married a man who is physically repellent to you. Want to back out? I don’t mind. Want to roll the dice and see what happens? Tell me. Tell me now.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, her voice dropping in register, a cold hand squeezing at her heart.

  “It’s all a matter of choice. You want to believe you can walk away with half of our wealth. You also want to believe you can walk away with all your knowledge about how things really work, how we jerk around others, how our enterprises are nothing like they seem. Pick up the dice and drop them in the cup. Everyone should have a second chance. It’s easy enough. You’re a brave girl. Shake the cup and rattle them out on the felt.”

  She looked into the moral vacuity of his eyes and for the first time felt genuine mortal fear of the man she had married. She started to speak, but her words caught in her throat.

  “A country-and-western band should be entertaining the folk at Yellow Bay,” Leslie said. “We can watch the folk at work and play in the fields of the Lord. It’s Saturday night for the folk, and their messianic songstress will be there to brighten their lives.”

  “I think you’re going to hell,” she said.

  “We already live there, my dear. You just haven’t realized it.”

  He reached out with his mutilated hand and touched little Dale’s cheek.

  CHAPTER 28

  AFTER THE CARGO van stopped, someone slid open the side door, and Candace felt a rush of cool air and mist in her face. Through the loose space in the tape, she saw a framed-up two-story building, half of it walled with logs. A yellow backhoe was parked in the trees, its lights on, a pile of dirt glistening by the steel bucket. A work-booted man in a rumpled black suit walked heavily across the clearing and grabbed Jimmy Dale Greenwood by the shirt and the back of his belt and dragged him across the ground to the edge of a pit. Then he used one foot to shove him over the edge.

  The three men who had kidnapped and bound Candace were still inside the vehicle, smoking cigarettes, uncomfortable with what they were becoming witness to, trying to figure out a way to extricate themselves and still get paid by their employer.

  “Put her in the house,” the driver said.

  “What for?” Layne, the blond man, said.

  “We don’t know what for. That’s the point,” the driver said. “Let’s put her in the house and get out of here. We delivered the Indian. That was our job. We didn’t see the rest of it. The girl brought herself here. It’s not on us.”

  “What about el geeko?” Layne said.

  “What about him?” the driver asked.
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  “We just gonna drive off?” Layne said.

  Candace could hear the men in front turning around in their seats to visually confirm the naked fear they had heard in Layne’s question. The man in the front passenger seat said, “Yeah, just drive off. What, you worried about our friend’s feelings out there?”

  “I’m for it if you guys are,” Layne said. “I was just saying…”

  “Saying what?” the driver asked.

  “That guy has got a long memory.”

  Candace could hear no sound in the van except the drumming of the rain on the roof.

  “Put her in the house, Layne,” the driver said.

  “Me?” Layne said. “Put her in there yourself. I ain’t touching her.”

  But their argument was moot. The man in the rumpled suit returned to the van and lifted Candace up like a bale of hay by the twine. He carried her to the edge of the pit and swung her out into space, where for a moment she saw the sheen of the fir and pine trees in the lights of the backhoe, just before she plummeted into the pit.

  She thudded on top of another body, her bones jarring inside her. She thought she had landed on Jimmy Dale Greenwood, but he was lying against the wall of the pit, his face turned from her, his hands jerking furiously against the tape that was still cinched around his wrists. Then she realized a third person, someone she didn’t know, was in the pit with them.