James Burke - Swan Peak

“What difference does it make? It’s yesterday’s box score, right?” Clete said. “What are those guys over there looking at?”

“Her name is Jamie Sue Stapleton. Her husband might call her Wellstone, but for a lot of us she’ll always be Jamie Sue Stapleton from Yoakum, Texas, ’cause that’s where she comes from. Don’t be talking about box scores, either, not when it comes to Jamie Sue.”

Clete refocused his eyes on Gribble, as though looking at a different man from the one he had picked up on the dirt road.

“Where you going?” Clete said.

“I feel sick. I took some cold medicine today. I’m gonna lie down in the back of the truck,” Gribble said. “I think I’m fixing to pass out.”

Gribble went out the door, his hand pressed to his stomach. Clete ordered another round, wondering if he was the only sane person on the planet.

In the next hour, Clete lost count of the amount of booze he pumped into his system. The noise inside the club had become deafening, and the band had compensated by turning up its loudspeakers. The hands on the clock above the bar either had no motion at all or in seconds indicated that twenty minutes had passed. Clete was sweating inside his clothes, his ears filling with sounds like wind blowing across moonscape. For just a moment all sound stopped, as though the shapes and movements of people around him were one-dimensional and no more real than those of a silent cartoon on a screen.

A second later, the sound track returned with the power of someone clapping his hands on Clete’s ears.

“Hey, Mac?” the bartender said.

“What?”

“You were in the Crotch?”

“Who told you I was in the Corps?”

“You asked me if I’d been at Parris Island.” The bartender leaned closer. “Keep your eyes on me. Don’t turn around. You hearing me, gunny?”

“Yeah,” Clete said.

“Those guys at the back table must know you from some other gig.”

“Yeah, they come into that joint on Highway 12 and 93.”

“I heard them talking. Don’t get yourself hurt.”

“You telling me they want some shit?”

“No, I didn’t say that at all.”

“Give me another shot and a beer back.”

“I tried.”

“Semper Fi,” Clete said, finishing the whiskey in his shot glass, sweat glistening on the tips of his hair.

He went into the restroom and came back out, looking directly at the bikers and the woman in the Harley T-shirt. They appeared to have lost interest in him. When he returned to the bar, a college boy and his girlfriend were standing on either side of his stool, trying to catch the bartender’s attention. “Sorry, we didn’t know you were sitting here,” the boy said.

“Forget it. You guys have one on me. I think I fried my mush,” Clete said, and put a five-dollar bill on the bar.

He walked outside, slightly off balance, the wind suddenly cool and fresh in his face, the stars arching across a black sky. He didn’t bother to see if Gribble was still in the camper’s shell; he didn’t care if Gribble was there or not. He opened the driver’s door to Albert’s truck, pulling the keys out of his pocket, and bent over to get in. That was when he saw a shadow break across the corner of his vision.

The blow was as hard as a blow can be before a person loses consciousness. The weapon itself seemed to come out of the sky, whistling as it whipped across the back of Clete’s skull. Inside a secluded place where Clete often lived, he knew he had been hit with a blackjack, one that had been manufactured in the classic design of a lead weight sewn inside an elongated sheath, mounted on a spring, balanced perfectly on a leather-woven grip that allowed the assailant to deliver a crushing, even fatal, blow with little effort.

Clete crashed across the seat and fell into a heap on the opposite side of the cab. With his blood running from his scalp into his collar, he felt himself being driven to a place and a final act that he had avoided for years – in Irish Channel street rumbles and on night trails strung with toe-poppers and booby-trapped 105 duds and in firefights with the death squads in El Salvador and up against the Mob in Reno and during Katrina when the levees collapsed and he had watched his first and only love, the Great Whore of Babylon, drown under the waves.

FOR AN INDETERMINATEperiod Clete lay in the bottom of a dark well that was filled with memories and sensations that he thought he’d forgotten long ago. He saw himself stripping away a brick wall in an old house on Tchoupitoulas, where a corpse dancing with maggots had been entombed. He saw himself prying open the trunk of a car inside which a mobster had been locked before it was driven into Lake Pontchartrain. He felt his weight bounce tight inside a parachute harness when he was in Force Recon, the breath whooshing from his chest, his steel pot razoring down on his nose.

He wanted to get out of the dark well, away from memories that somehow were associated with confinement and suffocation and bondage. Where was he? Why wouldn’t light enter his eyes when he opened them? All he could remember was the blow against the back of his head and tumbling into a great blackness that seemed to have no bottom.

When Clete actually awoke, to the degree that he knew he was still alive, he realized his eyes were wrapped with tape, his wrists locked behind a tree trunk with ligatures. He could smell pine needles on the forest floor and hear the wind blowing through the canopy. Above him, perhaps up a slope, he heard a heavy machine clanking and grinding over rocks and rough ground, then a sound like a steel bucket thudding into the earth, scraping up dirt and small boulders, unloading it all in a rasping downpour from a steel bucket.

The ground was hard under Clete’s buttocks, the bark of the tree cutting into his back. He pulled against the ligatures, then tried to get to his feet, but the circumference of the trunk was such that he couldn’t negotiate enough space to push himself into an upright position. His immobility was like that of a man prematurely sealed inside a coffin.

He scraped the tape back and forth against the tree bark, hoping to pull it loose from his eyes. But his abductor had wrapped it several times around Clete’s head, winding it tightly into the scalp and hair and the bloody wound where Clete had been hit with the blackjack. Then it had been wound around the eye sockets and eyebrows, molding the layers so that they probably could not be removed except with scissors or a knife. Clete pushed his heels into the dirt and tried to bend the tree backward against its root system, but to no avail. Up above, the earth-grader or bulldozer or whatever it was continued to grind and clank and dump large loads of dirt in a pile, the stench of burnt diesel drifting off its smokestack.

Why was somebody excavating on the hillside? What was he digging?

A grave , Clete thought. Or a place to bury someone alive . He could feel sweat breaking on his forehead. “Who the hell are you?” he said.

But his words were lost in the engine’s roar and the scrape of steel against dirt and rock. He tried to think. Was it the bikers from the club? Were they twisted on meth? Would they take a barroom beef this far?

It was possible. They nailed women’s hands to trees. If he could work one wrist loose. If he only had a weapon. His twenty-five auto, his switchblade, even a can of Mace. Why had he messed with those guys?

But he knew the answer. Clete had spent a lifetime wading across the wrong Rubicon, provoking the skells and meltdowns, defying authority, ridiculing convention and normalcy. Women loved him for his vulnerability, and each one of them thought she was the cure for the great hole inside him that he tried to fill with food and booze and the adrenaline high that he got from dismantling his own life. But one by one they had all abandoned him, just as his father had, and Clete had immediately gone back on the dirty boogie, once more postponing the day he would round a corner and enter a street where all the windows were painted over and there was no sign of a living person.