James Burke - Swan Peak

The future didn’t exist, right? So what was the point of trying to control what hasn’t happened? The same applied with relationships. People came and went in your life, just like people entered turnstiles and exited them on the other side. In and out, right? Why place your trust in anyone who was just passing through?

She didn’t remember her mother. Her father was nicknamed Smilin’ Jack. He claimed the mother had died of ovarian cancer up in British Columbia, where he had worked as a gypo logger and sometimes on commercial fishing boats. But others said Candace’s mother was a morphine addict and a prostitute who ran a brothel in Valdez. When Candace was thirteen, Smilin’ Jack left her with a cousin in Seattle and went into the Cascades to pan gold. He was never seen again. He didn’t abandon her. He wasn’t profligate or mean or selfish. He had simply walked off in the rain, just like he was entering a turnstile, and had been absorbed by the great green-gray mass of mountains east of Seattle.

Now it was early Thursday morning in a budget motel not far from the Blackfoot River, downwind from a sawmill that smelled like the Pacific Northwest where Candace had grown up. The lights were on in a truck stop across the road, and log trucks were parked outside the café area, their diesel engines hammering. The rain had quit, and Candace knew it was going to be a good day. Or did she just want it to be a good day? The latter thought was disturbing to Candace, because wanting or needing anything, particularly when it had to be granted by other human beings, was an invitation to dependency and trouble.

She had made a cup of instant coffee from the hot water in the bathroom tap, and she drank it in her pajamas by the window and watched Troyce sleep. She didn’t understand Troyce. He was not like any man she had ever known. He opened doors for her, waited for her to order first in a restaurant, and didn’t use profanity in her presence. He seemed to genuinely like being with her and gave her money for whatever she wanted to buy without her even asking. But their first night together in a motel, she had clicked off the television set with the remote and turned off the overhead bed lamp and pulled the blanket up to her chin, waiting in the darkness for his hand to touch her. When he fell fast asleep, his back to her, she attributed his behavior to the fatigue that the injuries in his chest caused him.

In the morning she had felt his hardness against her hip, his breath touching her cheek like a feather. Then he’d opened his eyes and smiled at her like a man who wasn’t quite sure where he was. He’d gone into the bathroom and brushed his teeth and shaved and combed his hair. When he came out, drying his neck with a towel, his cheeks ruddy, he was completely dressed. He asked her what she wanted for breakfast.

She did not question him about his past, less out of fear of what he was than fear that he would lie to her. If he lied to her, she would know that in reality he was like other men, that he did not respect her and his attitude toward her had been dishonest and manipulative from the beginning. Her realization that she had stepped over a line and had made herself vulnerable to a man she hardly knew – except that he reminded Candace of her father – filled her with trepidation and anxiety and a growing sense of distrust about herself.

She had taken care of herself since she was thirteen. She didn’t need any more lessons in the school of hard knocks.

But now she found herself residing in a canyon wet with dew, across from a truck stop whose neon signs smoked in the cold, wondering if all her experience on the ragged edges of America had adequately prepared her for the relationship she had entered with a six-feet-five man by the name of Troyce Nix.

He pushed himself up in bed, his face flinching with the pain his wounds caused him. He had never been specific about the origin of his injuries. He had said simply, “A fellow tried to do me in. He dadburned near pulled it off.” He never denied he had been a cop of some kind. By the same token, he didn’t indicate he had been one, either. From the way he talked, she believed he had been in the army, maybe even to Iraq, and had encountered some kind of trouble there, maybe even in an army stockade. He always read the articles about the war first when he opened the newspaper. But wherever he had been or whatever he had done, he was a man’s man, and other men knew it. When she was with him, other men didn’t let their eyes wander as they would have if she had been alone. He seemed to find no fault in her, never criticized, and always laughed at her jokes and her irreverence. He had become the man who had always lived on the edge of her dreams, one who had chased float gold in the Cascades, believing rocks washing down from snowmelt could make him and his daughter rich.

In short, she had fallen in love with a man who didn’t touch her under the sheets in the darkness. Ironically, he had become the elusive figure who had been absorbed on the other side of the turnstile.

She sat down on the mattress and picked up Troyce’s hand in hers. She made circles with her fingers on the round outlines of his knuckles and brushed back the hair on his forearm. “I feel like I’m not being the friend I should be,” she said.

“You’re real special. You just don’t know it,” he said.

“Somebody hurt you, Troyce. Last night you didn’t want to tell that fellow Mr. Robicheaux why you were looking for the man in the photo. I didn’t talk to him about you, but because you don’t tell me what’s going on, I could have opened my mouth and said the wrong thing.”

“Well, you didn’t, and that’s all that matters.”

“Don’t you like me?”

“Sure, I do. Any man would. You’re heck on wheels, little darlin’.”

“Is it something about the way I look? My tattoos or the pits in my face?”

He lifted his hand from hers and touched his fingers on her cheek and around her mouth and eyes and behind her ears. The top of her pajamas was unbuttoned, and she saw his eyes drift to the tattoos of flowers on her breasts. His fingers grazed her nipples, his lips parting slightly. “I’m cut up too bad inside,” he said. “That fellow broke the shank off in me. I like to bled to death.”

But she’d seen the lie in his eyes before he even spoke it.

“It’s all right. You’ve been good to me, Troyce. I’m not complaining,” she said.

“A woman like you is the kind every man wants. You’re loyal, and you’re not afraid. Background or schooling don’t have anything to do with what a man likes. You’ll give a man your whole person and stick with him to the graveyard. I know men better than you do. Believe me when I say that.”

She searched his eyes, her heart twisting inside her, a terrible truth suggesting itself right beyond the edge of his words.

“Don’t cry. I wouldn’t do anything to make you cry, little darlin’,” he said.

THAT SAME THURSDAYmorning Molly and I drove into Missoula and had breakfast, then went to the courthouse, where I told Joe Bim Higgins of my conversation with the Indian girl who had been wearing a cross similar to the one Seymour Bell had probably worn around his neck the night he was murdered.

“The Indian gal is some kind of campus minister with this revival group?” he said.

“That’s what she says. But she didn’t seem to know Seymour Bell or Cindy Kershaw.”

“You think Bell was mixed up with Jamie Sue Wellstone somehow? Like a junior minister with her group?”

“Could be.”

“I think we have a random killer on our hands. I don’t particularly care for rich outside folks buying up the state, but I don’t make the Wellstones for killers.”