Swan Peak (20 page)

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.

After Jamie Sue washed and dried her face and put on fresh makeup, she went to the bar and sat on a stool, waiting for her head to stop spinning. The daytime bartender walked over to her and leaned on his arms. “Want another gimlet, Ms. Wellstone?”

“Can you make an Irish coffee?”

“We don’t get a lot of calls for that one. But let’s see what I can come up with,” Harold replied.

He poured coffee into a tall glass from a carafe on the back bar, then added a brimming shot of Jack Daniel’s and covered the top with whipped cream he sprayed from a can. He inserted a spoon in the glass and wrapped the glass with a napkin and set it on the bar. Then he placed another napkin and a sugar cube beside the glass.

“How much is that, Harold?”

“It’s on me. It’s not very professionally done.”

“That’s very kind. I don’t want you to get in trouble with your employer, though.” She took a ten-dollar bill from her purse and placed it on the bar.

He gathered up the bill in his palm. “Mr. Wellstone with you today?” he asked.

“No, he’s not,” she replied.

He brushed at his nose with the back of his wrist and looked out at the lake. “I wonder if I can ask you a favor.”

“What is it?”

“Just say no and I’ll understand.”

She felt her impatience growing, as though an annoying person were pulling on her sweater to get her attention. She let her eyes go flat and drank from her glass without speaking.

“I got a camera here. If I ask Betty in there to take our picture, would you mind?” he said.

“No, of course I wouldn’t mind. You asked about Leslie. Did you want to talk to him about something?”

“No, not really. He seems like a nice gentleman, is all I was saying. I bet he was a brave soldier.”

“You’d have to ask him.”

“Ma’am?”

She felt the mixture of caffeine and bourbon and gin take hold in her nervous system, and not in a good way. Her stomach was sour, and pinpoints of moisture broke on her temples. The bartender called the waitress, then posed stiffly by Jamie Sue’s side, not touching her, while the waitress took their picture. “Thank you, Ms. Wellstone,” he said.

“You’re welcome,” she said, sitting back down. “Take this away, will you, and give me another gimlet, one as cold as those others were.”

“If that’s what you want.”

Of course that’s what I want, you idiot, or I wouldn’t have ordered it
, she caught herself thinking.

“Sorry?” he said.

“You seem like a man of the world. Would you ever indicate to a woman she was your hired slut?”

The bartender’s mouth opened.

“The question isn’t meant to startle or to offend. Would you say something like that to a woman,
any
woman? Do you know any man who would?”

“No, Ms. Wellstone, I wouldn’t do that. I don’t associate with men who talk like that, either.”

“I didn’t think so. That’s why I asked. The gangster in the photograph with his girlfriend? Why would they come to Swan Lake? Didn’t they live in Beverly Hills? Why would anyone come here in the winter and build a snowman on the edge of a frozen lake? Didn’t she commit suicide? Didn’t she take an overdose of sleeping pills in Austria and lie down in a snowbank and go to sleep and wake up dead?”

“Ms. Wellstone, you’re really worrying me,” the bartender said.

“There’s nothing wrong with me, Harold. I wish you would not indicate there is. I wish that lake was full of gin. It looks like gin when the sun goes behind the mountains and the light fades, doesn’t it?”

“I guess you could say that.”

“Would you like to call up my husband and talk with him? Were you in a war, Harold? My father was. A Japanese soldier stuck a bayonet in his chest and destroyed his lung. My father pulled out the bayonet and killed the Japanese soldier with it. My husband wasn’t interested in the story.”

Harold finished making the gimlet but didn’t place it on the bar. He picked up a bar rag and wiped his hands with it, clearly caught between his desire to please and his fear that he was about to pour gasoline on a flame.

She propped her elbows on the bar and pressed her fingertips against her temples. “I’m sorry, I’m not feeling well,” she said. “Please excuse my behavior.”

“Everybody has those kinds of days. This morning a guy was tailgating me. When we got to the red light, I walked back to his truck and—” Harold stopped, his attention riveted on the doorway that led into the café.

“What is it?” Jamie Sue said. Then she heard her little boy, Dale, screaming his head off.

Quince had just walked through the bead curtain, carrying Dale in his arms, the beads trailing off Dale’s head. “I’m sorry, Miss Jamie. I got up from the table to get him some ice cream and he fell out of the high chair.”

She got off the bar stool, the blood draining from her head into her stomach. She lifted Dale from Quince’s arms and held him against her breast. He had stopped crying, but he was hiccuping uncontrollably, and his cheeks were slick with tears. Quince got a chair for her, and they sat down at one of the tables by the small dance floor. “Miss Jamie, I don’t talk out of school, but I know what’s going on. It’s that guy from New Orleans, Clete Purcel, isn’t it? He’s been nothing but trouble since we caught him trespassing on the ranch. He put Lyle in the hospital and went out of his way to cause disruption in y’all’s home life. I’m not a blind man. I got my feelings. Excuse me for being direct.”

She had her hands full with Dale, and she couldn’t concentrate on what Quince was saying. The saloon was empty except for her and her little boy and Quince and the bartender, and every sound seemed to resonate off the polished wood surfaces and echo against the ceiling.

“Lyle just got out of the hospital last night. The cops aren’t gonna do anything about it, either. I heard your brother-in-law talking to the sheriff. The sheriff must have said something about ‘fair fight,’ because Mr. Wellstone really got mad and said, ‘Why don’t you people grow up? This isn’t a Wild West movie.’”

“Did he hit his head?” Jamie Sue asked.

“Who? You mean Dale? No ma’am. I mean I don’t know. He did a flip right over the eating board and crashed on the floor. His little face just bashed right into it. I bet it damn near rattled his brains loose. The waitress come running around the counter and spilled a tray all over a guy’s suit.”

Jamie Sue thought she was going to be sick. “Bring the car around,” she said.

“I was fixing to do that.”

“Then go do it.”

“Ma’am?”

“Shut up and go do it. But just shut up.”

When Quince got to his feet, his belt buckle and flat-plated stomach and starched work shirt were so close to her face, she could smell his odor. For just a moment she saw a look in his eyes that went way back into her early life in the South — the kind of feral anger you normally associate with abused animals that have been pushed into a corner with a stick. Except the form of resentment she saw in Quince’s face was far more dangerous than its manifestation in animals. It was hardwired into an entire class of poor-white southern males, like genetic clap they passed down from one generation to the next. They had perhaps the lowest self-esteem of any group of human beings in the Western Hemisphere and blamed Jews, Yankees, women, and black people for their problems, anyone besides themselves. They stoked their anger incrementally every morning of their lives; they fed on violence and exuded it through their pores. The mean-spirited glint in their eyes always seemed to be in search of a trigger — a word, a gesture, an allusion — that would allow them to vent their rage on an innocent individual. Blacks feared them. Their fellow whites avoided them. But no reasonable person deliberately incited them.

“Did you hear me, Quince? I’ve got more than I can handle right now,” Jamie Sue said. “Where’s my cell phone?”

“On the table.”

“Don’t just stand there. Go get it and bring it to me. Then get the car. You can bring the cell phone and bring the car around without my saying anything else, can’t you?”

“I’ll do just that. Yes ma’am, I’ll get cracking on that son of a bitch right now,” Quince said.

Moments later, Jamie Sue emerged from the saloon with Dale in her arms. His diaper was wet. Blinded by the brilliance of the sunshine, he looked about him as though seeing the world he lived in for the first time. Quince had backed up the Mercedes and was coming hard toward the entrance of the saloon, gravel pinging under the fenders. Jamie Sue held Dale tightly against her chest and turned her back, shielding her son from the dust Quince had scoured out of the parking lot. She could feel Dale’s little heart beating against her own, his frightened mouth wet on her cheek.

As the dust drifted in an acrid-smelling cloud over both of them, she knew why the gangster’s girlfriend in the photograph had come to Swan Lake in the wintertime. It was because of the cold. The cold numbed all feeling. It drove other people from the cottages and the saloon and the café and the highways. It sculpted the birch trees into bone and flanged the lake with ice and made the countryside white and sterile and pure. It left the girl in the photo free, because now she had nothing else to lose, and there were no comparisons in her ken to remind her of how much she had lost.