James Burke - Swan Peak

“Have a good one,” he replied.

CLETE DID NOTtry to apologize, nor did I want him to. Clete was Clete. You don’t invite bulls into clock shops and act surprised at the results. Besides, crimes committed in the state of Montana were not our business. Perhaps it was time to accept that fact and leave other people to their own destiny.

At least that was what I told myself.

The next afternoon Clete borrowed Albert’s pickup truck, in case the two FBI agents he called Heckle and Jeckle were still surveilling him. He showered and put on his sports clothes and told me he was going to listen to some music at a club down in the Bitterroots. I’m sure that was his intention. I’m sure that, like me, he was willing to go with the season and to let others do whatever it was they wished to do. But that was not the way it would work out.

IN THE NEXTdrainage, J. D. Gribble was walking along the dirt road in the dusk, his twenty-two Remington pump gripped in one hand. He shielded his eyes from the late sun as Albert Hollister’s truck approached him, stepping to the side of the road, pointing the rifle away from the vehicle. Then he realized Albert was not behind the wheel.

“Sorry to blow dust all over you,” Clete said. “Are you the new fellow who works for Albert?”

“Yes sir.”

“Have you seen him around? His wallet fell out on the seat.”

“Not since this morning,” Gribble said. He saw Clete taking note of the rifle in his hand. “A fox was in Mr. Hollister’s brooder house. I think I hit him, but he went on up the hill.”

“If you see Albert, tell him I left his wallet at the house.” Clete had propped a long-neck beer between his thighs. Ten more longnecks were stuck down in a bucket of crushed ice on the passenger seat. He lifted the open bottle and drank from it. The bottle was still beaded with cold, and the late sunlight sparkled inside it. “Want one of these brews?”

“I wouldn’t mind.”

Clete pulled a bottle out of the ice and twisted off the cap. When he handed the bottle to Gribble, he noticed that Gribble was shaved and had on fresh clothes and that his hair had been wet-combed and had not had time to dry. He also remembered Albert saying that his new man didn’t own a vehicle and walked everywhere and did not hitchhike under any circumstances, for whatever reason.

“I’m going down the road to listen to some music. Care to join me?” Clete said.

The club was thirty miles south in the Bitterroot Valley. The sun had gone behind the mountains on the west side of the valley, and the air was cool and smelled of the river and irrigated alfalfa in the fields. The sunset was one of the most extraordinary Clete had ever seen. A long stream of clouds, like curds of lavender smoke, flowed for miles and miles over the Sapphire Mountains in the east, pink-tinted on the edges, right next to an expanse of sky that was robin’s-egg blue. Clete stood in front of the nightclub, his beer bottle in his hand, gazing at the vastness of the valley around him as though he had personally discovered and laid claim on it for the rest of mankind. “Do you believe this place?” he said to Gribble. “Good Lord in heaven, do you believe this place?”

Inside at the bar, Clete remained effusive, ordering double shots of Jack with a beer back, calling requests up to the bandleader, his voice louder than it should have been. He drank without sitting down, knocking back Jack and sipping from his beer, touching the foam off his lip with a folded paper napkin. His maroon shirt and beige slacks and shined oxblood loafers gave him a fresh and relaxed appearance that did not match the transformation Gribble saw taking place in him. The back of Clete’s neck was oily and red. His green eyes were lit with a dangerous shine. His pumped forearms and the great breadth of his shoulders seemed to grow in size with his increased intake, like the boiler plate on a furnace expanding with its own heat.

“You can flat tank it down,” Gribble said.

But Clete didn’t hear him. He was talking to a blond woman who had serpentine tats on her arms and looked like she was about to burst out of her Clorox-white jeans and black Harley T-shirt. The woman seemed fascinated by Clete and the libidinal energies he radiated. But her friends at a far table were not impressed.

“Mr. Purcel, those bikers over yonder look pretty proprietary,” Gribble said.

Clete responded by buying the woman a drink and raising his own in a toast to the bikers.

“I avoid trouble, sir. I hope you’re the same kind of man,” Gribble said.

“Drink up,” Clete said, hitting him on the back. “It’s Friday night. You ever hear of Sam Butera and Louie Prima? Every Friday night back in the seventies, I’d watch them blow out the walls in a joint on Bourbon Street.” Clete turned toward the bikers at the far table. “Hey, you guys ever hear of Louie Prima?”

“Mr. Purcel, I’m getting a real bad feeling here,” Gribble said.

“Lighten up. If those guys had anything going, they wouldn’t dress in clothes somebody scrubbed out a grease trap with,” Clete said. He signaled the bartender. “Give my friend here a draft with a depth charge. Give a round to the waxheads at the table while you’re at it.”

“You sure about that?” the bartender said.

“I look like I don’t know what I’m doing, here?” Clete said.

“Three or four beers is about it for me, Mr. Purcel,” Gribble said.

“Screw that,” Clete replied.

The band was country-and-western. A cook was serving Mexican dinners from a pass-through window in the kitchen, and the crowd was happy and growing louder, and the dancers on the floor had reached that stage of cautionary abandon where they were bumping into tables and one another, with no sense of either ill will or danger. Clete asked the band’s vocalist if she could sing “I Forgot More Than You’ll Ever Know.”

“That’s Skeeter Davis’s song,” Gribble said.

“I knew a woman who could sing it just like Skeeter Davis.”

“No kidding?” Gribble said, lowering his beer bottle, his expression mildly curious.

“Anyone ever tell you that you got a voice like Lefty Frizzell?”

“Not really. Where’d you know this lady at?”

“I heard her sing in a beer joint in Texas once.”

Gribble looked straight ahead, his face empty, his beer bottle tilted forward in both hands, the heels of his boots hooked on the rungs of the bar stool. “There’s not many can sing like Skeeter could. What was this lady’s name?”

“Jamie Sue Wellstone.”

Gribble wiped his mouth with a napkin, hiding his expression.

The woman in the Harley T-shirt grew tired of being ignored by Clete and rejoined her friends at the table. Clete stared at the woman’s back, trying to remember why he had talked to her in the first place. He thought he could hear kettle drums beating in his head or tropical birds lifting from a jungle canopy, their wings flapping loudly against the sky.

“You ought not to keep looking at them men,” Gribble said.

“You ever sleep with another man’s wife?” Clete asked.

“Sir?”

“I hadn’t ever done that, at least not knowingly. Ever sleep with the wife of a man who was burned up in a tank?”

“Mr. Purcel, I ain’t up to this.”

“Were you in the service?”

“No sir.”

“See, when you watch other guys pay really hard dues, you accord them a certain kind of respect. That means you don’t screw their wives or even their girlfriends, particularly when it’s not an even field any longer. The guy who does that doesn’t deserve to wear the uniform. He doesn’t deserve to tell people he ever wore it, either.”

“You slept with this woman you was talking about?”