James Burke - Swan Peak

“Did you hear me, Quince? I’ve got more than I can handle right now,” Jamie Sue said. “Where’s my cell phone?”

“On the table.”

“Don’t just stand there. Go get it and bring it to me. Then get the car. You can bring the cell phone and bring the car around without my saying anything else, can’t you?”

“I’ll do just that. Yes ma’am, I’ll get cracking on that son of a bitch right now,” Quince said.

Moments later, Jamie Sue emerged from the saloon with Dale in her arms. His diaper was wet. Blinded by the brilliance of the sunshine, he looked about him as though seeing the world he lived in for the first time. Quince had backed up the Mercedes and was coming hard toward the entrance of the saloon, gravel pinging under the fenders. Jamie Sue held Dale tightly against her chest and turned her back, shielding her son from the dust Quince had scoured out of the parking lot. She could feel Dale’s little heart beating against her own, his frightened mouth wet on her cheek.

As the dust drifted in an acrid-smelling cloud over both of them, she knew why the gangster’s girlfriend in the photograph had come to Swan Lake in the wintertime. It was because of the cold. The cold numbed all feeling. It drove other people from the cottages and the saloon and the café and the highways. It sculpted the birch trees into bone and flanged the lake with ice and made the countryside white and sterile and pure. It left the girl in the photo free, because now she had nothing else to lose, and there were no comparisons in her ken to remind her of how much she had lost.

I WENT EARLY FRIDAYmorning with Clete to the health club on the Bitterroot highway, south of Missoula, and watched him work out on the heavy bag. He wore a purple-and-gold Mike the Tiger sweatshirt, the sleeves sawed off at the armpits, and a pair of shiny red rayon boxing trunks that hung to his knees. He was smacking the gloves hard into the bag, up on the balls of his feet, his weight forward, throwing his shoulders into it, vibrating the bag on its chain, whap, whap, whap . I could smell beer in his sweat.

I stood up from the chair I was sitting on and steadied the bag. I could feel the power of his blows thudding through the bag’s thickness into my hands. He reminded me in his style of Two-Ton Tony Galento. He swung his left and his right with equal murderous effect, full-out, in sweeping roundhouse hooks, his face deadpan, his brow furrowed. And like Galento in either the ring or a broken-glass back-alley brawl, Clete was as indifferent to his own pain as a bull is when it advances toward a matador.

He had been in a funk for days, and I didn’t know what it would take to get him out of it. He said his liver ached, and his blood pressure was probably through the roof. I thought if I stayed with him, got him into the steam room and a shower and a change of clothes, he could start the day fresh and clean and free of the boilermakers that daily fouled his blood. We could drive downtown to a workingman’s café and enjoy a breakfast of steak and eggs and spuds, like we used to do when the two of us walked a beat in the French Quarter. It would be a modest start, but at least it would be a start. As the writer Jim Harrison once said, we love the earth but we don’t get to stay. So why not have a decent sunrise or two while we’re hanging around?

But I knew my chances were remote. I also knew the thoughts that were going on behind that furrowed brow. “That Wellstone woman isn’t worth it, Cletus.”

“Who said she was? What does it take to get you off my case, Streak?”

How do you tell your best friend that his problem is not the women in his life but himself? Maybe it had not been Jamie Sue Wellstone’s intention, but she had driven the barb deep, twisted it, and broken it off inside Clete’s elephantine hulk. In fact, she had done what is perhaps the worst thing one human being can do to another. She had made Clete feel that he had been used and used badly, led into a tryst and discarded like yesterday’s bubble gum. Even worse, she had left him with uncertainty about her motivation. She had fixed it so he couldn’t simply close the door on what had happened and mark off the whole episode as bad judgment, the kind of mistake that men over forty line up to commit again and again. Instead, he would repeatedly sort through each sordid detail with tweezers, wondering if he was being too severe in his judgment of her or if he wasn’t simply an over-the-hill fool.

“Stop looking at me like that,” he said.

“Like what?”

He smacked the bag hard, flinging sweat out of his hair. “Like it’s me who’s always got that problem. Like it’s me who doesn’t see the world as it is.”

“I never said that.”

He threw a left into the bag, then hit it with a right hook that was so hard the blow pushed me back, even though my feet were set and I was holding the bag with both hands.

“You didn’t make Heckle and Jeckle over there?” he said.

At the other end of the building, two men in their thirties were shooting baskets, concentrating on their game, their backs to us.

“No, I didn’t make them for anything except two guys playing with a basketball,” I replied.

“How many guys have haircuts like that and look like jocks on crystal meth?”

“The FBI has other things to do besides follow guys like us around.”

“Watch this,” Clete said, cupping his hands by his mouth. “Hey, ladies, I got to grab a shower, then Dave and I are going to motor downtown for some eats. Join us if you like.”

The two men stopped their game and looked at us blankly. I felt my face shrink with embarrassment.

“We’ll see you at Stockman’s,” Clete shouted. “They make pork-and-beef sandwiches that’ll rev up your dorks for a week.”

“I’ll see you out front,” I said.

“Nobody believed Hemingway when he said the feds were bird-dogging him. After he blew his head off, somebody got hold of his FBI file and found over two hundred pages of surveillance on him. You’re always quoting Hemingway. You think Hemingway was just blowing gas?”

“Why should the feds have this huge interest in you? Why don’t you try a little humility for a change?”

“Maybe they’re looking at me for Sally Dee’s death. Maybe they’re humps for the Wellstone family. How do I know what they’re after? I camped on the Wellstone ranch by mistake and got in the Wellstones’ crosshairs. Why should they care about a PI with a jacket like mine? I don’t think it’s about oil and methane, either. What’s crazy is I think we’re probably looking right at it, but we don’t see it.”

“See what?”

“I don’t know. It’s not just money. These cocksuckers moved past that a long time ago. They can punch wells all over the planet and send the bill to the taxpayers. Look at those two guys bouncing the ball off the rim. You don’t think they have Quantico written all over them?”

I didn’t want to hear any more of his obsession. I drank coffee in the lobby, then went outside and sat in his Caddy and waited some more. The two men who had been shooting baskets emerged from the health club, still wearing their sweats, looking back over their shoulders. They walked to the far end of the parking lot and got in a four-door black car with a fresh wax job and drove off. They got as far as a half-block from the club when one of them picked up a handheld and put it to his ear.

Clete and I drove to Stockman’s and ate at the counter. Outside, the street was still cool and covered with shadow. The black four-door sedan was parked halfway down the block. The crew-cut, unshowered jocks from the health club were sitting in the front seat. I had a hard time concentrating on my food.