James Burke - Swan Peak

The bartender picked up a pencil and pad and set it in front of him. “You want to leave a message, I’ll make sure she gets it.”

“You’re Harold?”

“What’s your business here, pal?”

“This guy.” Troyce put the mug shot of Jimmy Dale Greenwood in front of him.

“You have some ID?”

Troyce took out his wallet. It had been made by a convict, rawhide-threaded along the edges, the initials T.N. cut deep inside a big star. Troyce removed a celluloid-encased photo ID and set it on the bar.

“This says you’re a prison guard,” the bartender said.

“I’m that, among other things.”

“This doesn’t give you jurisdiction in Montana. Maybe not a whole lot in Texas, either.”

“You know that for a fact?”

“I used to be a cop.”

“I think your waitress friend in there has seen this fellow. I’m wondering if you have, too.”

The bartender picked up the photo and tapped its edge on the bar, taking Troyce’s measure. The bartender’s pate was shiny with the oil he used on his few remaining strands of black hair, his shoulders almost too big for the immaculate oversize dress shirt he wore. His physicality was of a kind that sends other men definite signals, a quiet reminder that manners can be illusory and the rules of the cave still hold great sway in our lives.

“A drifter was in here a couple of times. He was asking about Ms. Wellstone. He looked like this guy,” the bartender said.

“You know where he is now?”

“No.”

“Does your waitress?”

“She’s not my waitress.”

Troyce smiled before he spoke. “I do something to put you out of joint?”

“Yeah, you tried to let on you’re a cop. We’re done here.”

ANYONE WHO HASspent serious time in the gray-bar hotel chain is left with certain kinds of signatures on his person. Many hours of clanking iron on the yard produce flat-plated chests and swollen deltoids and rock-hard lats. Arms blanketed with one-color tats, called “sleeves,” indicate an inmate has been in the system a long time and is not to be messed with. Blue teardrops at the corner of the eye mean he is a member of the AB and has performed serious deeds for his Aryan brothers, sometimes including murder.

Wolves, sissies, biker badasses, and punks on the stroll all have their own body language. So do the head-shaved psychopaths to whom everyone gives a wide berth. Like Orientals, each inmate creates his own space, avoids eye contact, and stacks his own time. Even an act as simple as traversing the yard can become iconic. What is sometimes called the “con walk” is a stylized way of walking across a crowded enclosure. The signals are contradictory, but they indicate a mind-set that probably goes back to Western civilization’s earliest jails. The shoulders are rounded, the arms held almost straight down (to avoid touching another inmate’s person), the eyes looking up from under the brow, an expression psychologists call “baboon hostility.” The step is exaggerated, the knees splayed slightly and coming up higher than they should, the booted feet consuming territory in almost surreptitious fashion.

Every inmate in the institution is marked indelibly by it, and the mark is as instantly recognizable as were the numbers tattooed on the left forearms of the inmates in Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. The difference is one of degree and intention. Time in the system prints itself on every aspect of an inmate’s behavior and manner.

On Wednesday evening the weather was still cold, the air gray with rain, and at Albert’s ranch we could hear thunder inside the snow clouds that were piled along the crests of the Bitterroot Mountains. Albert asked me to take a ride with him to check on the new man he had hired to care for his horses in the next valley. He said the man’s name was J. D. Gribble.

Gribble’s cabin was little more than one-room in size, heated by a woodstove that he also cooked on. He was unshaved and wore jeans without knees and only a T-shirt under his denim jacket. He smoked hand-rolled cigarettes and kept his cigarette papers and tobacco and a folder of matches in a pouch on the same table where he ate his food. In his ashtray were paper matches he had split with his thumbnail so he could get two lights out of one match.

Albert and I drank coffee and condensed milk with the new man, then Albert went out to the barn to check on his horses. Through the window I could see lightning tremble on the sides of the hills, burning away the shadows from the brush and trees. The cabin windows were dotted with water, the interior snug and warm, still smelling of the venison the new man had cooked for his supper. In the corner was a twenty-two Remington pump, the bluing worn away, the stock badly nicked. He followed my eyes to the rifle.

“I bought that off a guy in a hobo jungle for ten dollars,” he said.

“Where you from, podna?” I asked.

“Anyplace between my mother’s womb and where I’m at now,” he replied.

“What were you down for?” I said.

“Who says I was down for anything?”

“I do,” I replied, my eyes on his.

“It was a bad beef. But everybody in there has got the same complaint. So I don’t talk about it.”

“Albert is a friend of mine,” I said.

He was sitting right across the plank table from me. He picked up his coffee cup and drank from it, his hand fitted around the entirety of the cup. “I already told Mr. Hollister I ain’t necessarily proud of certain periods in my life. I had the impression he accepted my word and didn’t hold a man’s past against him.”

“Is that your guitar?”

He rubbed the calluses on his palms together, his eyes empty. He stared out the window into the darkness as though he had found no good words to use. “There ain’t nobody else living here. So I guess that makes it mine.”

“It was just a question.”

“I’ve had a lifetime supply of questions like that. They always come from the same people.”

“Which people is that?” I asked.

“The ones who want authority and power over others. The kind that ain’t got no lives of their own. The kind that cain’t leave other folks alone.”

“That’s hard to argue with,” I said. “But here’s the problem, J.D. When a guy is still splitting matches, he hasn’t been out long. When a guy is on the drift from another state, he either went out max time or he jumped his parole. If he went out max time, he’s probably a hard case or a guy who was in for a violent crime. If he’s wanted on a parole violation, that’s another matter, one that’s not too cool, either.”

“I got news for you, mister. I ain’t a criminal. And I ain’t interested in nobody’s jailhouse wisdom, either.”

“Tell Albert I’m out in the truck. Thanks for the coffee,” I said.

“You got a problem with me working here, tell Mr. Hollister. I was looking for a job when I found this one,” he said.

There was a mean glint in his eye that probably did not serve his cause well. But I couldn’t fault him for it. It’s easy to come down on a man who doesn’t have two nickels in his pocket. Actually, I had to give J. D. Gribble credit. He hadn’t let me push him around. In truth, the crime of most men like him is that they were born in the wrong century. The Wellstones of the world are another matter. Maybe it was time to take a closer look at them and not scapegoat a drifter who was willing to risk his job in order to retain his dignity.

IT WAS STILLraining Friday evening when I drove to a revival on the Flathead Indian Reservation, up in the Jocko Valley, a few miles from Missoula. The light was yellow and oily under the big tent, the surrounding countryside a dark green from the rains, clouds of steam rising from the Jocko River and the unmowed fields, the Mission Mountains looming ancient and cold against a sky where the sun did not set but died inside the clouds.