James Burke - Swan Peak

I got to my feet, dusting grains of dirt off my hands. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Dave, if what Seymour’s roommate told us is true – I mean about Seymour being a fighter – maybe there’s another possibility we haven’t looked at.”

I waited for him to continue. In the distance, the wind was blowing the snowcap on Lolo Peak, powdering the sky with it, smudging the light.

“What if we’re not dealing with just one guy?” Clete said.

TROYCE NIX HADflown into Spokane on pain pills and adrenaline, then had gone directly to a Toyota dealership and purchased a repossessed SUV. The vehicle had to be prepped before Troyce could drive it away, so he checked into a motel on I-90 east of the city and told the salesman to deliver his purchase when it was ready.

The motel was almost to the Idaho line, a leftover from an earlier time, constructed of pink stucco, set back in the deep shadows of cedar trees and fringed with purple neon. Next door was a steak house and saloon that featured live country music. Troyce ate a twenty-ounce porterhouse and sipped a Manhattan while he listened to the music from the bandstand. It wasn’t long before a fellow traveler caught his eye and nodded politely to him.

The fellow traveler looked western enough, in tight stonewashed jeans and a hand-tooled belt and a short-brim cattleman’s hat. But the clipped mustache hid a feminine mouth, and the wide shoulders inside the snap-button shirt couldn’t disguise the flaccidity of his upper arms. Nor was the fellow traveler shy about glancing back at Troyce from the bar, flexing his buttocks against his jeans.

He wasn’t quite Troyce’s type, but it had been a long time between drinks.

The next afternoon Troyce’s SUV was delivered to the motel. The only problem was that Troyce’s interlude with the fellow traveler had proved both exhausting and complicated in ways he hadn’t expected. As a result, his wounds ached, his pain pills and alcohol intake had collided in his nervous system, and he didn’t trust himself to drive. Fortunately, he met another pilgrim, this one a honky-tonk in-your-face piece of work by the name of Candace Sweeney.

She said she would drive him all the way to Missoula for fifty bucks and drinks and the cost of a bus ticket to Livingston, where she claimed she had a job cooking at a dude ranch. “It’s not a bad gig if you don’t mind rich old guys scoping your jugs every time you lean over the table,” she said.

It was twilight as they drove into the Idaho Panhandle and the mountains and lake country around Coeur d’Alene. In the glow of the dash, Troyce could see the tattoos of flowers on the tops of Candace Sweeney’s breasts, and the tiny pits in her cheeks, and the black shine in her hair, which she wore in bangs, giving her a little-girl look that didn’t fit anything she was saying.

“You’re a cop, aren’t you?” she said.

“What makes you say that?”

“I can always tell. Cops think behind their eyes. The ones on the make do, anyway.”

“I look like I’m on the make?”

“No, you just think a lot. You see the ambulance take that guy out of the motel this morning?”

“No.”

“Somebody knocked his teeth out with a blackjack. He wasn’t saying who. He works the saloon sometimes, mostly married men who haven’t figured out they’re fudge packers.”

“Too bad.”

“Occupational hazard when you’re selling your ass in a rawhide bar. He usually works hotels in Spokane or in Portland and Seattle. If you knew some of those sagebrush schmucks back there, you wouldn’t mess with them. They’ve got no idea what goes on in their own heads. If they did, they’d stick a gun in their mouths.”

“Never heard it put that way.”

The sun had gone below the mountains, and the lakes on either side of the road were dark and glazed with the lights from boathouses and sailboats, the water sliding up onto rocky shoals.

“I used to have a little junk problem – tar, mostly. I got busted on a possession charge in Portland. The court sent me to a twelve-step program. I thought most of it sucked, then one night I heard these women start talking about certain sexual problems they developed with their own kids, like, they wanted to molest them. Puke-o, right?

“I didn’t want to hear this shit, because I’d had a little boy myself that I gave up to Catholic Charities. Except the story these women told was a little bit too familiar, know what I mean, like yuck, they’re talking about me. They all said they were molested themselves when they were little, and they knew if they did it to their own kids, their kids would have the same kind of miserable lives they’d had. This one woman said the only way she could spare her little boy was to drown him in the bathtub.

“Don’t look at me like that. She didn’t do it. But here’s where it gets even worse. These women said that killing their kids was a way of looking out for them. Then they figured out that wasn’t the reason at all. They wanted to kill their kids because they thought the little girl inside them was a whore and had to pay the price for what she did, I mean causing all the trouble for the grown-up. How sick does it get? Like gag me out, double puke-o again.”

Troyce studied the side of Candace Sweeney’s face for a long time. “Why are you telling me this?”

She glanced at him, disconcerted. They were headed up the Fourth of July Pass now, the forests on either side of them carving out of the darkness in the headlights. “I wasn’t telling you anything. I was saying, you know, that-” Her words seized up in her throat. The muscles in one side of his face had been impaired by an incision of some kind, perhaps by a knife wound, and his expression looked disjointed, split in half, as though two different people shared his skin.

“You were saying what?” he asked.

“That whoever smacked around the bone-smoker back there probably hasn’t figured out why he does stuff like that. Like he’s a sick fuck. Like maybe I was, too. That’s just the way the world is. People don’t necessarily get to choose what or who they are.” She turned her eyes boldly on Troyce’s face.

“You’re pretty smart,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s why I’m a cook for CEO titty babies who get their dorks mixed up with their deer guns.”

Up ahead, the road was empty. Troyce twisted in the seat and looked through the back window. A car’s taillights were disappearing in the opposite direction. “Pull in to that rest stop,” he said.

“That’s not a very good place.”

“Why not?”

“They don’t clean it. It smells like a bear took a dump in it six months ago and forgot to flush the toilet.”

“That’s all right. Pull in.”

She parked the SUV by the public restroom, where an apron of electric light fell on the gravel and the roof of the vehicle and the giant log that separated the parking area from the sidewalk, all the things that should have looked normal and comforting but were now removed from the asphalt highway connecting Troyce Nix and Candace Sweeney to the rest of the world.

“You didn’t cut the engine,” he said.

“I was gonna listen to the radio,” she said.

He turned off the ignition for her, then rolled down his window on the electric motor. The air was sweet with the smell of the woods, and water was ticking out of the trees. “Say that last part again. That part about the woman hating the little girl still living inside her,” he said.

“I’m not into Jerry Springer. If you want to fuck me, I’ll give it some thought. But I was talking about myself, nobody else.”

“I want you to change my bandages. I’m leaking.”

“What happened to you?”

“Who cares? Tell me about that woman again, the one who was going to drown her kid.”