Swan Peak (2 page)

Both front doors of the truck opened, and two men stepped out on the rocks. They were smiling, glancing up at the hilltops, as though they were sharing in Clete’s appreciation of the morning. “Get a little lost?” the driver said.

“Somebody locked the snow gate on the state road, so I turned in here for the night,” Clete said.

“That road is not state-owned. It’s private. But you probably didn’t know that,” the driver said. The accent was slightly adenoidal, perhaps Appalachian or simply Upper South.

“My map shows it as a state road,” Clete said. “Would you mind cutting your engine? I’m starting to get a headache, here.”

The driver’s physique was nondescript, his face lean, his brown hair dry and uncombed, ruffling in the breeze, his smile stitched in place. A half-circle of tiny puncture scars was looped under his right eye, as though a cookie cutter had been pressed into his skin, recessing the eye and dulling the light inside it. His shirt hung outside his trousers. “Have you caught any fish?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Clete replied. He looked at the passenger. “What are you doing?”

The passenger was a hard-bodied, unshaved man. His hair was black and shiny, his dark eyes lustrous, his flannel shirt buttoned at the wrists and throat. He wore canvas trousers with big brads on them and a wide leather belt hitched tightly into his hips. The combination of his unwashed look and the fastidious attention he gave his utilitarian clothes gave him a bucolic aura of authority, like that of a man who wears the smell of his sweat and testosterone as a challenge to others. “I’m writing down your license number, if you don’t have an objection,” he said.

“Yeah, I do object,” Clete said. “Who are you guys?”

The unshaved man with black hair nodded and continued to write on his notepad. “You from Lou’sana? I’m from down south myself. Miss’sippi. You been to Miss’sippi, haven’t you?” he said.

When Clete didn’t reply, the passenger said, “New Orleans flat-ass got ripped off the map, didn’t it?”

“Yeah, the F-word in Louisiana these days is FEMA,” Clete said.

“You got a lot less Afro-Americans to worry about, though,” the passenger said. He rolled the racial designation on his tongue.

“What is this?” Clete said.

“You’re on posted land, is what this is,” the driver said.

“I didn’t see any sign to that effect,” Clete said.

The passenger went to the truck and lifted a microphone off the dash and began speaking into it.

“You guys are running my tag?” Clete said.

“You don’t remember me?” the driver said.

“No.”

“It’ll come to you. Think back about seventeen years or so.”

“Tell you what, I’ll pack up my gear and clear out, and we’ll call it even,” Clete said.

“We’ll see,” the driver said.

“We’ll
see
?” Clete said.

The driver shrugged, still grinning.

The passenger finished his call on the radio. “His name is Clete Purcel. He’s a PI out of New Orleans,” he said. “There’s a pair of binoculars on the seat of his convertible.”

“You been spying on us, Mr. Purcel?” the driver said.

“I’ve got no idea who you are.”

“You’re not working for the bunny huggers?” the driver said.

“We’re done here, bub.”

“We need to look inside your vehicle, Mr. Purcel,” the driver said.

“Are you serious?” Clete said.

“You’re on the Wellstone Ranch,” the driver said. “We can have you arrested for trespassing, or you can let us do our job and look in your car. You didn’t have situations like this when you worked security at Tahoe?”

Clete blinked, then pointed his finger. “You were a driver for Sally Dio.”

“I was a driver for the car service he used. Too bad he got splattered in that plane accident.”

“Yeah, a great national tragedy. I heard they flew the flag at half-mast for two minutes in Palermo,” Clete said. He glanced at the black-haired man, who had just retrieved a tool from the truck and was walking back toward Clete’s Caddy with it. “Tell your man there if he sticks that Slim Jim in my door, I’m going to jam it up his cheeks.”

“Whoa, Quince,” the driver said. “We’re going to accept Mr. Purcel’s word. He’ll clean up his camp and be gone—” He paused and looked thoughtfully at Clete. “What, five or ten minutes, Mr. Purcel?”

Clete cleared an obstruction in his windpipe. He poured his coffee on his fire. “Yeah, I can do that,” he said.

“So, see you around,” the driver said.

“I didn’t get your name.”

“I didn’t give it. But it’s Lyle Hobbs. That ring any bells for you?”

Clete kept his expression flat, his eyes empty. “My memory isn’t what it used to be.”

The man who had introduced himself as Lyle Hobbs stepped closer to Clete, his head tilting sideways. “You trying to pull on my crank?”

Clete set his tin coffee cup on the rock next to his Fenwick and slipped his hands into the back pockets of his jeans, as a third-base coach might.
Don’t say anything
, he told himself.

“You don’t hide your thoughts too good,” the driver said. “You got one of those psychodrama faces. People can read everything that’s in it. You ought to be an actor.”

“You were up on a molestation charge. You did a county stint on it,” Clete said. “The girl was thirteen. She recanted her statement eventually, and you went back to driving for Sally Dee.”

“You got a good memory. It was a bum beef from the jump. I got in the sack with the wrong lady blackjack dealer. Hell hath no fury, know what I mean? But I didn’t drive for Sally Dee. I drove for the service he contracted.”

“Yeah, you bet,” Clete replied, his eyes focused on neutral space.

“Have a good day,” Lyle Hobbs said. His head was still tilted sideways, his grin still in place. His impaired eye seemed to have the opaqueness and density of a lead rifle ball.

“Same to you,” Clete said. He began to take down his tent and fold it into a neat square while the two visitors to his camp backed their truck around. The back of his neck was hot, his mouth dry, his blood pounding in his ears and wrists.
Walk away, walk away, walk away
, a voice in his head said. He heard the oversize truck tires crunch on the rocks, then the steel bumper scrape across stone. He turned around in time to see one wheel roll over his Fenwick rod and grind the graphite shanks and the lightweight perforated reel and the aluminum guides and the double-tapered floating line into a pack rat’s nest.

“You did that deliberately,” Clete said, rising to his feet.

“Didn’t see it, Scout’s honor,” the driver said. “I saw them comb Sally Dee and his crew out of the trees. The whole bunch looked like pulled pork somebody had dropped into a fire. You’re a swinging dick, big man. Public campground is five miles south. Catch a fat one.”

CHAPTER 2

CLETE AND MY
wife, Molly, and I had come to western Montana at the invitation of a friend by the name of Albert Hollister. Albert was a novelist and retired English professor who lived up a valley off the state road that ascended over Lolo Pass into Idaho. He was an eccentric, a gadfly, and in most ways a gentle soul. Unbeknownst to his colleagues, he had served time on a road gang in Florida when he was eighteen. He had also been a drifter and a roustabout until age twenty, when he enrolled in the same open-door, poor-boy college I had attended.

I had always admired Albert for his courage and his talent as an artist. But I tried not to let my admiration for him involve me in his quixotic battles with windmills. His rusted armor always lay at the ready, even though his broken lances littered the landscape. Unfortunately, many of his causes were just ones. The tragedy was they were not winnable, and they were not winnable because the majority of people do not enjoy the prospect of being tacked up on crosses atop a biblical hill.

But Albert was Albert, a generous and brave man who protected the wild animals and turkeys on his property, fed stray dogs and cats, and hired bindle stiffs and broken-down waddies most people would shun.

He gave us a log cabin that was shaded by cottonwoods next to a creek on the far side of his barn. He gave Clete the bottom third of his massive stone-and-log home. Our plans were to spend the summer fishing the Blackfoot and Bitterroot rivers, with an occasional excursion onto the Lochsa River in Idaho or over east of the Divide to the Jefferson and Madison. The riparian topography of those particular waterways is probably as good as the earth gets. The cottonwoods and aspens along the banks, the steep orange and pink cliffs that drop straight into eddying pools where the river bends, the pebbled shallows where the current flows as clear as green Jell-O across the tops of your tennis shoes, all seem to be the stuff of idyllic poems, except in this case it’s real and, as John Steinbeck suggested, the introduction to a lifetime love affair rather than a geographical experience.

I had taken leave from the Iberia Parish Sheriff’s Department, where I made a modest salary as a detective-grade sheriff’s deputy. Hurricanes Rita and Katrina had spared our home on East Main in New Iberia. But Clete had watched the city of his birth drown. He had not recovered, and I was not sure he ever would, and I had hoped Montana would offer a cure that I could not. Clete was one of those who always tried to eat his pain and shine the world on. There was only one problem. His pain didn’t go away, and the booze he drank and the weed he smoked and the pills he dropped didn’t work anymore.

But we would soon learn that the state of Montana, with all its haunting beauty, would not provide a panacea for either of us. Both of us had been here in the late 1980s, and neither of us had dealt adequately with the ghosts we had created.

Clete had left the valley the previous day for two days of fishing in the Swan River country. But at one P.M. on the following day I saw his maroon Caddy coming hard up the dirt road. He passed Albert’s stone-and-log house up on the bench, passed the barn and horse pasture, and turned in to the rutted lane that led to our cabin. It was a bluebird day, one that had started off beautifully. I had a feeling that was about to change, and in truth I did not feel like fitting on a Roman collar.

He told me what had happened that morning beside the creek on the ranch owned by a man named Ridley Wellstone.

“You think they’re neo-Nazis or cultists of some kind?” I said.

“A guy at the courthouse said Wellstone is a rich guy from Texas who moved here about a year ago. What doesn’t flush is this guy who ran over my fly rod. He said he remembered me from Lake Tahoe, that he was a driver for a car service there. Then he said he saw Sally Dio and his gumballs combed out of the trees after their plane crashed into a hillside in Montana.”

Clete tried to hold my eyes, then looked away. His association with Sally Dio was not one he was fond of remembering. The circumstances of the plane accident that killed Dio were not details he cared to revisit, either.

“Go on,” I said.

“The guy was trying to tell me he never worked for Dio, but at the same time he was telling me he drove Dio around in Nevada and was at the site where Dio’s plane crashed. It’s coincidence he was in Montana on the res when Dio smacked into a mountain?”

“In other words, he was one of Sally Dio’s people?”

“Yeah, and a perv who molested a thirteen-year-old girl on top of it.”

“Blow it off,” I said.

We were sitting on wood chairs on the porch now. My fly and spinning rods were propped against a hitching rail, my waders hanging upside down from pegs on the front wall. The hillsides that bordered Albert’s ranch were dotted with ponderosa and larch and Douglas fir trees, and when the wind blew, it made a sound like floodwater coursing hard through a dried-out streambed.

“The guy deliberately destroyed my tackle and lied in my face about it,” Clete said.

“Sometimes you’ve got to walk away, Cletus.”

“That’s what I did. And I feel just like somebody put his spit in my ear.”

But I knew what was eating him. After Sally Dee’s plane had smacked into a hillside on the Flathead Indian Reservation, the National Transportation Safety Board determined that someone had poured sand into the fuel tanks. Clete blew Montana like the state was on fire. Now, unless he wanted someone asking questions about his relationship to Sally Dee and Sally’s clogged fuel lines, he had to allow one of Sally’s lowlifes to shove him around.

“Maybe the deal with your fly rod was an accident. Why’s a guy like that want to pick a beef with you? Sally’s dead. You said it yourself. The guy in the pickup is a short-eyes. You don’t load the cannon for pervs.”

“Good try.”

“You can use my spinning rod. Let’s go down on the Bitterroot.”

He thought about it, then took off his hat and put it back on. “Yeah, why not?” he said.

I thought I’d carried the day. But that’s the way you think when your attitudes are facile and you express them self-confidently at the expense of others.

IT WAS EVENING
when the red pickup with the diesel-powered engine came up the dirt road, driving too fast, its headlights on high beam, even though the valley was only in part shadow, the oversize tires slamming hard across the potholes. The truck slowed at the entrance to Albert’s driveway, as though the men inside the cab were examining the numbers on the archway at the entrance. Clete’s Caddy was parked by the garage, up on the bench, against the hill, its starched top and waxed maroon paint job like an automobile advertisement snipped out of a 1950s magazine.

The pickup truck accelerated and kept coming up the road, spooking the horses in the pasture. Molly was inside the cabin, broiling a trout dinner that we had invited Albert and Clete to share with us. I watched the pickup truck turn in to the lane that led to our cabin, and I knew in the same way you know a registered-mail delivery contains bad news that I had sorely underestimated the significance of Clete’s encounter with the security personnel on the ranch owned by a man named Wellstone.

“Can I help you?” I asked, rising from my chair on the porch.