James Burke - Swan Peak

The operator of the heavy machine cut the engine. In the silence, Clete heard someone drop to the ground and walk toward him. The footsteps stopped, and Clete realized his abductor was standing above him, perhaps savoring the moment, perhaps positioning himself to inflict injury that Clete could not anticipate or protect himself from.

“Whatever you’re going to do, just do it,” Clete said. “But you’d better punch my whole ticket, because I’m going to hunt you down and-”

Before Clete could complete his sentence, the abductor crouched next to him and made a shushing noise, as though speaking to a troubled child. Clete turned toward the abductor, his scalp drawing tight, waiting for the blow or the instrument of torment to violate his body. He jerked at the ligatures on his wrists. “You motherfucker,” he said.

He heard the abductor click open the top of a cigarette lighter and rotate the emery wheel with his thumb. The abductor lit a cigarette and drew in on it, the paper crisping audibly as the ash grew hotter. Clete felt the exhaled smoke separate across his nose and mouth.

“Fuck you,” Clete said, his big heart thumping in his chest.

The abductor made no response and continued to blow his cigarette smoke on Clete’s cheek and neck.

“Dave Robicheaux leaves hair on the walls, bub. Ole Streak is a mean motor scooter. You don’t put the glide on the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide,” Clete said, the words starting to break nonsensically from his mouth. “Streak dumped a guy’s whole brainpan in a toilet once. That’s no jive, Jack. Think of me when you eat a forty-five hollow-point.”

The abductor got to his feet, dropped his cigarette into the pine needles, and ground it under the sole of his shoe.

“Who are you? Tell me who you are and why you’re doing this,” Clete said.

Instead of a reply, Clete heard liquid sloshing inside a container and the pop of a plug being pulled from an airtight spout on the container. A second later, gasoline rained down on his head, soaking his hair, burning the wound inside the tape around his eyes, drenching his shirt and skin, pooling in his lap. The abductor even pulled off Clete’s shoes and soaked his feet and socks and drew the line of delivery up and down his legs.

“You sonofabitch, you cowardly piece of shit,” Clete said, his voice cracking for the first time.

The abductor began to pile twigs and decayed tree branches and pinecones and handfuls of pine needles on Clete’s head and torso and legs, whistling a tune, journeying back into the underbrush to gather more fuel for his enterprise. Clete struggled again against the ligatures, then tried to stretch his body forward so he could work one foot under a haunch and raise himself erect. All his efforts were futile, and he felt a sense of remorse and irrevocable loss he had not experienced since his fifteenth birthday, when he had torn the hands off a windup clock his father had given him.

He couldn’t stop the tapes that kept playing themselves over and over in his head. The Big Exit should have come from a Bouncing Betty or at the hands of diminutive figures in black pajamas and conical straw hats threading their way through elephant grass that reminded him of Kansas wheat. But blood expander and a heroic navy corpsman who had dragged Clete down a hillside on a poncho liner had cheated Sir Charles out of another kill, and Clete had returned to the Big Sleazy and a battlefield of another kind.

The Mob had tried to kill him, and so had members of the NOPD. Whores had rolled him, and a sniper had put two twenty-two rounds in his back while he carried his patrol partner down a fire escape. He had skipped the country on a homicide beef and joined the leftists in El Sal, where he got to see up close and personal the handiwork of M16 rifles and death squads in Stone Age villages. But the real enemy always lived in his own chest, and like the gambler who hangs at the end of the craps table, bouncing the dice down the felt again and again, watching everything he owns raked away by the croupier’s stick, Clete had finally wended his way to a dark hillside in western Montana where he now lay powerless and defeated, waiting for a degenerate to roll the emery wheel on a cigarette lighter and turn his body into a funeral pyre.

How do you shut down a tape like that? How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?

LESS THAN FIFTYfeet away, Albert Hollister’s pickup truck was parked in a grove of pine trees, the camper bladed with moonlight. Inside the camper, J. D. Gribble was sleeping in a fetal position, a blanket wrapped around his head, his dreams peopled with images that he could not dispel or extract himself from. He heard the night sounds of a jail – the count man clicking his baton against the bars, somebody yelling in the max unit, a kid being wrestled down on a bunk, a rolled towel jerked back against his mouth. But the dream and the images in his head, brought on by the mixture of alcohol and cold medicine, were not just about stacking time.

He saw a dark corridor with bars set in the middle, and on the other side of the bars, a lighted world where a gold-haired woman in a sequined blue evening dress was playing an HD-28 Martin guitar. Her mouth was red, her expression plaintive, her dress as tight on her body as the skin on a seal. Behind her was a backdrop of alkali wasteland and low purple mountains that rimmed the entire horizon. She curved her palm around the guitar’s neck to chord the frets and seemed to purse her lips at Gribble as she sang.

In the dream, he walked down the corridor toward her until he reached the bars and had to stop and rest with his hands clinging to them. From out of the glare, a man in a linen suit approached the woman and opened a parasol, lifting it above her head, shading her from the sun. For the first time, Gribble noticed the woman’s belly was swollen with child. The man’s face was disfigured and did not look quite human, even though he was grinning at the corner of his mouth. The woman wore blue contact lenses, and both she and the disfigured man were staring oddly at Gribble, as though wondering why he did not recognize the inevitability of his rejection.

Was it so hard for him to understand that a woman carrying an unborn child must find ways to survive? Did he want the child aborted? Was she supposed to live on welfare while the father of her child spent his most productive years in a contract prison?

Actually, he understood those questions and would not argue with the answers they implied. The real question was one nobody had asked. Was her choice of a disfigured rich man driven by her need to survive or the need to sustain her celebrity? No one who has ever been sprinkled with stardust walks away from it easily. In fact, no one of his own volition ever walks away from it. Like youth, fame and adulation are not surrendered, they’re taken away from you.

It was cold inside the camper shell when the man who called himself Gribble woke from his dream. He pulled the blanket from his head and sat up in the darkness. He could feel the wind blowing against the camper, and through the tinted glass in the side panel, he thought he could see pine needles sifting through the air and the shadows of the trees changing shape on the ground. Then he realized the shadows were not just those of trees.

He rubbed his hand on the glass and saw a humped figure at the base of a ponderosa with his wrists fastened behind the trunk. He saw a second figure walk out of the darkness, carrying an armload of organic debris from the undergrowth. The figure stood above the man fastened to the base of the tree trunk and poured the load of twigs and dead branches and leaves on the man’s head and shoulders.

The man wore work boots and a dark suit and dark shirt. His hands and wrists were covered by rawhide gloves with cuffs that extended back over the wrists. He wore a full mask, one that was molded from thick plastic, bone-colored, hard-edged, and incised with slits to cool the skin. He seemed encased in his own darkness, his movements simian, his ritual one that he had learned and refined and fed in a private world that only his victims were allowed to witness.