Swan Peak (42 page)

“Yeah?” he said.

“You’ve been there?”

“When I was at Pendleton. It’s a nice city, the ocean and all.”

The waitress set a loaf of hot sourdough bread wrapped in a napkin on the table and went away. Alicia removed her glasses and put them in a case and snapped the case shut. For some reason, the indentations where the glasses fitted on the bridge of her nose made her look disarmed and vulnerable, as if she had chosen to look that way.

“You like West Coast living? Starbucks and jogging on the beach and surf fishing with old guys, that kind of stuff?” she said.

“Yeah, I can dig that. Any place where it’s warm and there’s water and a few palm trees. I spend most of my time now in New Iberia, where Dave lives.”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Because New Orleans isn’t New Orleans anymore.”

“It’s being rebuilt, isn’t it?”

“They won’t rebuild the place I grew up in. They don’t know how to. They weren’t there. Back then every day was a party. I don’t mean horns blowing and people getting drunk on their balconies. It was the way you woke up in the morning. Everything was green and gold, and the oaks were full of birds. Every afternoon it rained at three o’clock, and the whole sky would turn pink and purple and you could smell the salt in the wind. No matter where you went, you’d hear music — from radios and cafés and dance orchestras on the rooftops downtown. You could have all of it for the price of the ride on the St. Charles streetcar.”

“You’re going back there, aren’t you?”

“No, I like the idea of the West Coast,” he said. “See, I remember the way New Orleans used to be. If I didn’t remember the way it used to be, I could go back and live there. Sometimes good memories mess you up. What I mean is I dig the coast. A guy like me can always adjust.”

She looked at him a long time, as though staring at a man through a pane of thick glass she would never be able to penetrate. When their food was served, she barely spoke. If prescience was a gift, it did not show as such on her face.

Later that night, after he left her motel room, he thought he smelled flowers and the smell of salt spray on the wind. Then he realized it was her perfume and the smell of her skin and not a night-blooming garden in the neighborhood where he had grown up, or waves crashing on a beach in a place where he might live in the future, and he felt more alone and lost than he had ever felt in his life.

TWO HOURS LATER,
while Clete was trying to go to sleep, his cell phone vibrated under his pillow. The caller ID was blocked. “Clete?” a woman’s voice said.

It was not a voice he wanted to hear. “What’s the haps, Jamie Sue?” he said.

“We’ve got to get a message to this man Troyce Nix,” she said.

We?

He sat up in bed and adjusted the cell phone to his ear, wondering at the lack of judgment that seemed to characterize everything he did. “Why don’t
you
call Nix up? I’ll give you the name of his motel,” Clete said.

“I don’t have credibility with him. Neither does Jimmy Dale.”

“Jimmy Dale doesn’t have credibility with me, either. He hauled ass and left me to explain why I parked a round in Quince Whitley’s head. I may end up on a homicide beef because of Jimmy Dale, or J.D., or whatever his name is.”

“You’ve got it wrong, Clete. Jimmy Dale called the sheriff yesterday and told him what happened at the nightclub. He told the sheriff you saved the girl’s life and probably his own, too.”

She knew how to set the hook. “Yeah, but he didn’t make a formal statement, and he’s not going to, is he?” Clete said. “So my witness has the legal value of an anonymous phone caller.”

“You’ve got to help us. Jimmy Dale made a big mistake, and he doesn’t know how to correct it.”

Don’t bite
, he told himself.
It’s their problem, their karma, their bullshit
. “What mistake?” he asked.

“Jimmy Dale thought Nix was here to kill him. So he decided to do it to him first.”

“Do what?”

“Shoot Nix. It was in the park. He couldn’t go through with it. But Nix saw him and doesn’t understand what happened. Can’t you help us?”

“Are you running off with Jimmy Dale?”

“I can’t live with Leslie any longer. I can’t take his hate and his sickness and his cruelty. He’s not going to poison my little boy with it.”

“Is Sally Dio alive?”

“The gangster? Why should I know about him?”

“Because the FBI thinks he or one of his men survived a plane crash he should have gotten fried in. Because the Wellstones were mixed up in casino interests in Reno.Because a guy who worked for Sal is also working for your husband.”

“My husband is a lizard. You don’t know the things he does. Have you been drinking?”

Clete couldn’t put together the disconnect in her thinking. “I’ll call Troyce Nix for you, Jamie Sue. But I’m done with this doodah. You tell Jimmy Dale he and I are square, all sins forgiven, all debts paid. That means I want miles of track between me and y’all’s problems. We clear on this?”

“You’re a sweet man.”

“Anybody who says that doesn’t know anything about me,” Clete replied.

He closed his cell phone and flipped it over his shoulder onto the bed. If ever reincarnated, he vowed, he would live in a stone hut on top of a mountain in Tibet, thousands of miles away from people whose lives were modeled on the lyrics of country-and-western songs.

THAT SAME NIGHT
I lay beside Molly in our cabin north of Albert’s barn. The moon was down, and the sky was black and channeled with stars that looked like the tailings of galaxies. Our windows were open, and inside the wind and rumble of heat lightning, I could hear Albert’s horses nickering in the darkness.

We’re the blue marble in the solar system, wrapped by water and vapor but also by stars. The same ones I could see outside the window shone down on all of us — Clete Purcel and Alicia Rosecrans, wherever they were that night, Sonny Click on a slab, the Wellstone brothers and Jamie Sue and Lyle Hobbs in their compound north of Swan Peak, Quince Whitley awaiting the worms to violate his coffin, the improbable couple made up of a Texas gunbull and a young woman with chains of flowers tattooed on her breasts, the pair of them hunting down a hapless creature like Jimmy Dale Greenwood, whose only desire in life was to play his guitar and follow the rodeo circuit with Jamie Sue and his little boy.

All the players were out there, the children of light and the children of darkness, the blessed and the malformed, those who were made different in the womb and those who cursed the day they were born and those to whom every daybreak was filled with expectation. The stars enveloped the entirety of the planet, blanketing a desert where people killed one another in the name of God, while oil fires burned on the horizon and other people sloshed gasoline into their SUVs and believed in their innocence that the earth and its resources were inexhaustible.

What a grand deception and folly it was, I thought, and could not rid my mind of the bitterness in my own words.

I sat on the side of the mattress, my hands cupped on my knees, a chill shuddering through my body, as though my old friend the malarial mosquito had taken on new life inside my blood. I felt Molly’s hand touch my back.

“You have a bad dream?” she said.

“No,” I replied.

“You blame yourself for Sonny Click’s death?”

“No, he was an evil man, and I’m glad he’s dead. But I think something very bad is about to happen. It’s a feeling I can never explain. My nerves are wired, my skin crawls, my stomach starts churning. My spit tastes like battery acid. It’s like the feeling you have when you hear the popping of small-arms fire and you know something a whole lot worse is coming down the pike.”

She sat beside me and took my hand in hers. In the starlight I could see the freckles powdered on her shoulders. Her skin was still warm from sleep. “It’s Clete, isn’t it?” she said.

“He’s going to get himself killed. He won’t listen to me about anything. I wish I hadn’t brought him up here. This whole place is full of ghosts.”

“You’re talking about Sally Dio?”

“Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce came down that ridge right behind us and were wiped out on the Big Hole. The Blackfeet Indians got massacred on the Marias River the same way. The army burned their tents and blankets and left the wounded and the old people and the children to freeze to death. That’s the history that seldom gets written.”

She placed her hand on my forehead, then looked into my eyes. “I think you have a fever.”

“So what? That doesn’t change what I said.”

“Dave, let go of it.”

“Let go of what?”

“Everything. You can’t change the world.”

“Why did you work in El Salvador and Guatemala?” I said.

“So the world wouldn’t change me. There’s a big difference.”

“Your friends were killed down there, and few people cared. There’s no way to put a good hat on it, Molly. You ever see the media interview a GI who comes back on the spike?”

“That’s just the way it is. You give unto Caesar and hope he chokes on it. Like Clete says, good guys forever, and fuck the rest of it.”

“You don’t need to use language like that to make your point.”

“Under it all, you’re a priest, Dave. But that’s all right. I love you just the same.”

She ran her fingernails up through my hair. Then, as though conceding that her words would never be enough to argue against the rage and violence and thirst for alcohol that burned inside me, she exhaled and hit her fists on the mattress.

“Don’t be like that,” I said.

“Nothing I do helps. Nothing, nothing, nothing.” She pulled up her gown and spread her knees on my thighs, pressing my head into her breasts, her desperation and her own secret despair and need perhaps greater than mine. But if a momentary erotic impulse was driving her, she hid it well. She hit me again and again in the back, refusing to show me her face, her breath coming in angry gasps.

THE NEXT MORNING
Candace Sweeney and Troyce Nix ate breakfast downtown, then returned to the motel and saw the red message light blinking on their telephone. Candace called the front desk. She wrote down a number and a name on a notepad and replaced the receiver in the cradle.

“Who was it?” Troyce asked.

“That cop, that guy Purcel,” she replied.

“He’s a PI, not a cop. Most PIs are guys who got thrown off the force, usually for drinking or ’cause they were on a pad.”

“What do you think he wants?”

“To do his job, whatever it is. Most of those guys are bums and liars, so nothing they say means anything anyway. Tear up his number.” Then his face brightened. “I cain’t get over that line you used on him. ‘Change your deodorant.’ You’re a beaut.”

“I want to leave, Troyce. To eighty-six this crap and go ahead with our plans. Just a few hours’ drive, and we can start a whole new life.”

“I know, darlin’, but I cain’t have Jimmy Dale sneaking up on us when we’re in the Cascades, blindsiding us, maybe hurting you ’cause he cain’t get at me.”

“The cops or the FBI will catch up with him sooner or later.”

“Maybe they will. But ‘later’ ain’t much help when you’re dead.”

Troyce was combing his hair in the door mirror. The early-morning hours had been cold, and he had put on a long-sleeved gray shirt with white snap buttons, and his shoulders and arms looked huge inside the heavy fabric. He saw the disappointment in her face and stopped combing his hair.

“Jimmy Dale’s got an edge,” he said. “He ain’t a criminal. He’s committed crimes, but that don’t make him a criminal. He don’t think like and act like one. Cops don’t catch his kind. Maybe his kind catch themselves, but cops don’t do it. When you have trouble with a guy like Jimmy Dale, I’m talking about a breed with a resentment, you got to take him off at the neck, ’cause he’ll fix you if he has to spend the rest of his life doing it.”

“There’s something you never told me, Troyce.”

“What’s that?” he said, looking at his reflection again.

“If he’s not a criminal, why’d he cut you up? Why’s he hate you so much?”

“You got to ask that of a smarter man than me,” he replied. He turned away from her and brushed his teeth in the lavatory, although she was almost sure he had brushed them only a few minutes earlier.

Just after lunch, when Troyce went to buy a new battery for his cell phone, Candace punched in the number Clete Purcel had left with the front desk. “This is Candace Sweeney,” she said. “What do you want?”

“Where’s your boyfriend?” Clete asked.

“Troyce isn’t here.”

“When he is there, tell him to call me.”

“Why are you bothering us, fatso?”

“I think you’re insulting the wrong person. The last time I saw you, I prevented a peckerwood asswipe by the name of Quince Whitley from putting a bullet in you. You paid back the favor by telling the sheriff you didn’t see Whitley with a gun.”

“I told the sheriff the truth.”

“Glad to hear you’re keeping the standards up. In the meantime, I’m being looked at for a possible homicide beef. Tell Nix I got a message for him from Jamie Sue Wellstone. Also tell him I checked him out. He has a BCD from the army for his activities at Abu Ghraib. He seems not to have overcome his problems at that contract prison he worked at in Texas, either.”

“What message?” she said, her face burning. But she didn’t wait for Clete to reply. “You listen, you bucket of whale sperm, you couldn’t carry Troyce’s jockstrap.”

“I tell you what, here’s the message. Tell Mr. Nix he doesn’t need to call me back. Neither do you. Jamie Sue Wellstone says Jimmy Dale Greenwood thought your friend was going to take him out. Jimmy Dale tried to cap your friend first. Except he couldn’t go through with it. Why is that? you ask. Because as probably anyone with more than two brain cells could realize, Jimmy Dale Greenwood is not a killer. This is the message: Why don’t you leave the poor fuck alone? This is Clete Purcel signing off. You and your boyfriend have a great life, and please stay out of mine.”

The line went dead.