James Burke - Swan Peak

“Climb through the fence if you want to talk to me,” Albert said.

“I understand you might need a wrangler or a guy to handle rough stock,” the man said.

“Where’d you hear that?” Albert said.

“At the casino in Lolo.”

“You a rodeo man?”

“Not no more. Got busted up in Reno about four years back. I can still green-break them. I ain’t a bad trainer, either. I been a farrier, too.”

“I’ll meet you up at the cabin in a few minutes,” Albert said. “The elk popped a few clips on my back fence.”

“Got an extra pair of pliers?” the man asked.

A half hour later, Albert drank a glass of iced tea on the porch of the cabin with the man in the denim jacket, both of them seated in wood rocking chairs. It was shady and cool on the porch, and the man in the denim jacket looked tired, filmed with road dust, not quite able to concentrate on the conversation. He asked if he could wash inside. When he came back out on the porch, his hair was wet and combed out on his neck, his shirtsleeves rolled up high on his arms.

“What’s your name again?” Albert asked.

“J. D. Gribble.”

“You never got tattooed, J.D.?”

“I guess I never saw the advantage in it.”

“Ever spend time in jail?”

“Some.”

“Care to say what for?”

“Not using my head, mostly.”

“There’s a lot of that going around these days. Let’s see your guitar,” Albert said.

J. D. Gribble unsnapped the lid on his case and lifted the guitar from the felt liner and rested it across his lap. “It was my grandfather’s. Gibson stopped making this model about sixty years ago,” he said.

Albert put on his glasses and leaned forward to read the names that had been signed on the box. “Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Lucinda Williams, Jerry Jeff Walker,” he said. “You know these people?”

“I’ve sat in with them.”

“When that truck threw dust all over you, what were you thinking about?”

“Nothing.”

“Not a thing?”

“Except some folks don’t have no business driving on dirt roads, throwing dust and rocks all over people.”

“How about a hundred and fifty a week and rent and utilities?”

J.D. shifted the guitar on his lap and smiled. “That’s pert’ near the exact figure I had in mind.”

“On the subject of jail?”

“Yes sir?”

“I was on the hard road when I was eighteen. I was in several other cans, too. I wasn’t a criminal, but I could have turned out to be one.”

J.D. waited, unsure of what he was being told. “Yes sir, I’m listening.”

“That’s all. You have a voice and an accent that are reminiscent of Jimmie Rodgers. That’s quite unusual,” Albert replied. “I hope you like it here.”

CLETE PURCEL WASthe bane of his enemies and feared in New Orleans by pimps, drug dealers, cops on a pad, jackrollers, scam artists who victimized old people, and sexual predators of all stripes. Paradoxically, his closest friends included whiskey priests, strippers, stand-up cons, hookers on the spike, badass biker girls, button men, Shylocks, and mind-blown street people who claimed they had seen UFOs emerging from the waters of Lake Pontchartrain.

His reputation for chaos and mayhem was legendary. In the men’s room of the New Orleans bus depot, he forced a contract killer to swallow a full dispenser of liquid soap. In the casino at the bottom of Canal, he blew a degenerate into a urinal with a firehose, then escaped the building by creating a bomb scare on the casino floor. He dropped a Teamster steward off a hotel balcony into a dry swimming pool. He filled a gangster’s hundred-thousand-dollar convertible with concrete. He hijacked an earth-grader from a construction site and drove it through the front of a palatial mansion owned by a member of the Giacano crime family. No, that is not an adequate description. He drove an earthmover through the entirety of the house, punching through the walls, grinding the furniture and tile and hardwood floors into rubble under the steel tracks. Not satisfied, he burst through the back of the house and destroyed the garages and parked cars and all the grounds, uprooting the hedges and trees, pushing the statuary and flagstone terrace into the swimming pool, finally exiting the property by exploding a brick wall onto the avenue.

I could go on, but what’s the point? For Clete, life was a carnival, a theme park full of harlequins and unicorns, a reverse detox unit for people who took themselves seriously or thought too much about death. In an ambience of palm trees and pink sunrises on live-oak trees, of rainwater ticking onto the philodendron inside a lichen-stained courtyard, inside the smell of beignets and coffee and night-blooming flowers two blocks from the Café du Monde, he had lived the ethos of the libertine and the happy hedonist, pumping iron to control his weight, eating amounts of cholesterol-loaded food that would clog a sewer main, convincing himself that a vodka Collins had little more influence on his hypertension than lemonade.

During all of it, he had never showed his pain and had never complained. The Big Sleazy was God’s gift to those who could not find peace in either the world or rejection of it. How could one refuse life inside a Petrarchan sonnet, particularly when it was offered to you without reservation or conditions by a divine hand?

But the chink in Clete’s armor remained right below his heart, and the same knife went through it every time.

It’s fair to say most of his girlfriends were nude dancers, grifters, drunks, or relatives of mobsters. Most of them wore tattoos, and some had tracks on their arms or thighs. But the similarity in Clete’s lovers didn’t lie in their occupations or addictions. Almost all of them were incurable neurotics who went through romantic relationships like boxes of Kleenex. The more outrageous their behavior, the more Clete believed he had found kindred spirits.

Ironically, it wasn’t the hookers and strippers and addicts who did him the most damage. It was usually a woman with a degree of normalcy and education in her background who wrapped him in knots. I suspect a psychologist would say Clete didn’t believe he was worthy of being loved. As a consequence, he would allow himself to be used and wounded by people whose own lack of self-knowledge didn’t allow them to see the depth of injury they inflicted upon him. Regardless, it was the quasi-normal ones who hung him out to dry.

TWO DAYS AFTERour interview of Jamie Sue Wellstone, Clete began acting strange. “I’d better cancel out on our fishing trip today,” he said on our front porch after knocking at seven A.M.

“What’s the problem?” I said.

“Just some doodah I need to take care of in town,” he replied. He looked up at the sunlight breaking on the mountain, his cheeks bright with aftershave. His hair was freshly combed and clipped, his shoes buffed. He wore a pair of pressed slacks and a crisp new sport shirt.

“How about some coffee?” I said.

“I’d better run. Check with you later.”

“What are you up to, Clete?”

“Why do I always feel like you’re trying to staple my umbilical cord to the corner of your desk?”

“When will you be back?” I asked.

“Does anyone at your meetings ever say you have a control problem?”

By three that afternoon, he had not returned. I tried his cell but got no answer. I drove three miles down the highway to the little service town of Lolo and saw his convertible parked outside the town’s only saloon. He was at the far end of the bar, hunched over his drink, perhaps twenty feet away from a table full of bikers who were half in the bag. The bikers were talking loudly, obviously getting Clete’s attention, although they were unaware of it.