James Burke: Swan Peak

The two men who had gotten out of the truck cab looked exactly as Clete had described them. The one with the recessed eye socket stared up at me, a faint grin on his face. He wore a short-sleeve print shirt outside his slacks. “My name is Lyle Hobbs,” he said. “That yonder is Albert Hollister’s place, is it?”

“What about it?” I said.

He glanced at the Louisiana tag on the back of my pickup truck. “Because the owner of that Cadillac parked up yonder told me he wasn’t working for any bunny huggers. But that’s not so. That means he lied to me.”

“He doesn’t work for anyone . At least not in this state.”

“My instincts tell me otherwise. I hate a lie, mister. It bothers me something awful.”

I let the implication pass. “Maybe you should go somewhere else, then.”

The other man, who was unshaved and had thick, uncut black hair with a greasy shine in it, stepped in front of his friend. “What’s your name, boy?” he said.

“What did you call me?”

“I didn’t call you anything. I asked you your goddamn name.”

I heard Molly come out on the porch. The eyes of the two men shifted off me. “What is it, Dave?” she said.

“Nothing,” I replied.

“You tell Mr. Purcel he’s sticking his nose in the wrong person’s business,” Lyle Hobbs said. “Mr. Wellstone is an honorable man. We’re not gonna allow the likes of Mr. Purcel to besmirch his name. You tell him what I said.”

“Tell him yourself,” Molly said. She was holding a heavy cast-iron skillet, the kind used to cook large breakfasts for bunkhouse crews.

The man with black hair rubbed his thumb and forefinger up and down the whiskers on his throat, his eyes roving over Molly’s figure, a matchstick elevating in his mouth. “Sounds like somebody is whipped to me,” he said.

I stepped down off the porch, my old enemy ballooning in my chest, tingling in my hands. “I strongly recommend y’all drag your sorry asses out of here,” I said.

Lyle Hobbs continued to stare directly into my face, his eyes jittering. “We’re leaving. But don’t make us come back,” he said. “Those aren’t idle words, sir.”

He walked back toward his truck, then turned around, cleaning one ear with his little finger. He ticked a piece of matter off his fingernail. There was an indentation at the corner of his mouth, like a wrinkle in clay. “It’s Robicheaux, isn’t it?” he said.

“So?”

“Sally Dee purely hated you and Mr. Purcel. Used to talk about what he aimed to do to y’all. I saw him knock the glass eye out of a hooker because she mentioned your name. He was a mean little shit, wasn’t he?”

The sunlight was red across the valley as he and his friend drove back toward the state highway.

“Who are they, Dave?” Molly asked after they were gone.

“Trouble,” I said.

AFTER SUPPER,I talked with Albert about our visitors, the summer light still high in the sky, the valley blanketed with shadow, Albert’s gaited horses blowing in the grass down by the creek.

“They do security for a man name of Ridley Wellstone? From Texas?” he said.

“They seemed to know you,” I said.

Albert had fine cheekbones, intense eyes, and soft facial skin that belied the nature of his earlier life. His hair was white and grew over his collar, and he often wore an Australian digger’s hat that hung from the back of his neck on a leather cord. His profile always suggested Byronic images to me, a poet wandering in the wastes, kicking at stone fragments along the edges of a collapsing empire.

“They sound like worthless fellows to me. What was that other name you mentioned?” he said.

“Clete had a bad period in his life and got mixed up with some gamblers in Vegas and Tahoe. One of them was Sally Dio.”

“You talking about the Dio family out of Galveston?”

Oops.

“That’s the bunch,” I replied.

“They weren’t gamblers, they were pimps. They ran all the whorehouses. Clete worked for them?”

“For a while. They held his hand in a car door and slammed the door on it,” I said.

Albert set his boot on the bottom rail of the fence and gazed out at the pasture. His wife had died of Parkinson’s three years past, and he had no children. His whole life now consisted of his ranch in the valley and another horse ranch he operated on the far side of the mountain. I wondered how a man of his extreme passions lived by himself. I wondered if sometimes his private thoughts almost drove him mad. “If those fellows come back around, send them up to the house,” he said.

Not a good idea , I thought.

“Are you hearing me, Dave?” he said.

“You got it, Albert,” I said.

“Look at the horses out there in the grass. You know a more beautiful place anywhere?” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do if a man tried to take this from me.”

I’M NOT SUREI believe in karma, but as one looks back over the aggregate of his experience, it seems hard to deny the patterns of intersection that seem to be at work in our lives, in the same way it would be foolish to say that the attraction of metal filings to a magnet’s surface is a result of coincidence.

On Saturday morning Molly and Albert drove into Missoula to buy groceries at the Costco on the edge of town. They stopped on the way home to pick up a new Circle Y saddle Albert had ordered from the tack shop in the back of the Cenex. While Albert paid for his saddle, Molly drank a can of soda inside the store and watched the customers gassing up their vehicles at the pumps or lining up at the fast-food drive-by window next door. The day was lovely, the sky blue, the Rattlesnake Mountains to the north glistening with lines of snow that had fallen during the night. It was what a Saturday in America should be like, she thought, a day when family people stocked up on groceries and spoke with goodwill to one another inside the freshness of the morning.

On a newspaper rack directly behind her, the front page of the Missoulian contained a headline story about the discovery of a coed’s body in a canyon one mile from the University of Montana campus. The girl’s high school yearbook picture stared placidly at the customers walking in and out of the store.

A white limousine with several people seated inside it pulled up beside a gas pump, and a man who must have been six feet four got out of the back and came inside the store with the help of aluminum forearm crutches. He wore a pearl-gray Stetson, shined needle-nosed boots, an open-collar plum-colored shirt, and a gray suit that had thin lavender stripes in it. But it was his gaunt face and the suppressed pain in it that caught Molly’s eye. It was obvious that walking inside and struggling with the heavy glass door was a challenge to him, and Molly wondered why no one from his vehicle had accompanied him. In fact, Molly had to force herself to look straight ahead so the man on crutches would not think she was staring at him. When he got in line at the counter to pay for a newspaper and a package of filter-tipped cigars, she could see the set of his jaw and the rigidity of his posture out of the corner of her eye. There was a controlled tension in his expression, the kind you witness in people who are experiencing unrelieved back pain, the kind that dwells at the base of the spine like a thumb pressed against the sciatic nerve.

One of the clerks tried to scan the man’s package of cigars, but her scanner came up empty. “Do you know how much these are?” she asked.

“No, I don’t,” the man replied.

“I’m sorry, I have to get a price check,” the clerk said.

“That’s all right,” the man said.

But he was not all right. His hands were squeezed tightly on the grips of his crutches, his face gray and coarse-looking, his breath audible. When he tried to shift his weight, Molly saw the blood drain from around his mouth. The teenage stock boy who had been sent on the price check could not find the rack where the cigars were.