James Burke - Swan Peak

“What’s the purpose of your visit, sir?”

Troyce removed the booking-room photo of Jimmy Dale Greenwood from his shirt pocket and handed it to Leslie Wellstone. “You know this old boy?”

“Oh, yes,” Leslie said.

“He’s around here somewhere, ain’t he?”

“Possibly,” Leslie said, returning the photo to Troyce.

“Either he is or he ain’t.”

“What do you plan to do with him?” Leslie asked.

Troyce kept his eyes locked on Wellstone’s and didn’t answer.

“You’re that serious about him?” Leslie said.

“We got us a mutual interest, is the way I see it.”

“I don’t believe that’s the case at all. What do you think, Ms. Sweeney? You seem like a nice young woman. Do you understand what Mr. Nix is suggesting?”

“No,” she said.

“You don’t?” he said.

“It’s not my business.”

His eyes roved over her face, her mouth and throat, dropping briefly to her breasts. “Well, it’s been a pleasure meeting you all. Perhaps you can come back another time. We’re having friends over for a late lunch.”

“I was looking at your painting,” she said.

“Yes?”

“It reminds me of a billboard on the highway just south of Portland. Did the guy who painted this ever do billboards?”

Leslie Wellstone looked at her for a long time. Candace did not believe she had ever seen eyes like his. They seemed to exist like a separate and disconnected entity behind the burned shell that constituted his face.

“A billboard south of Portland?” Wellstone replied. “I’ll have to check that out and let you know.”

“Can I use your bathroom?” she asked.

He paused, then gestured with an open palm toward the hallway.

A few minutes later, she came back out of the bathroom. Troyce was alone in the living room.

“Where is everyone?” she asked.

“I think they’d rather we let ourselves out,” he said. “They’ll probably count the ashtrays when we’re gone.”

They walked down the flagstone steps to the SUV, where Sonny Click was waiting for them. Troyce was touching at his pockets.

“You forget your Cool Hand Luke shades?” Candace said.

“Yep.”

“Know why you’re always forgetting your glasses? It’s ’cause you don’t need them. It’s ’cause you use them to hide the real person you are.”

“Stay away from them self-help books, Candace,” he said.

Troyce returned to the doorway. He started to push the bell, then noticed that the lock had not clicked back into place. He eased the door open and stepped inside. Leslie Wellstone was standing by the hallway that led to the bathroom Candace had used. He was talking to the Hispanic maid.

“Spray every surface with Lysol and hand-wipe it with paper towels and clean rags,” he said. “Be especially attentive to the lavatory, the handles on the faucets, the toilet bowl and the rim and the toilet seat, everything she might have touched. When you’re done, put the rags and soiled paper towels and your cleaning gloves in a paper bag and burn them in the incinerator.”

“Yes sir,” the maid said, her eyes focusing on Troyce.

Wellstone turned around.

“I forgot my sunglasses,” Troyce said, picking them up from the coffee table.

“I see. So now you have them.”

Troyce slipped his shades into his shirt pocket and chewed on the corner of his lip. “You asked me what I aimed to do to Jimmy Dale Greenwood if I got hold of him,” he said. “The real question here is what I should do to a cripple man what just insulted the best person who probably ever come in his house. I feel like slapping your brains out, Mr. Wellstone. But I don’t think I could bring myself to touch you. It’s not your disfigurement, either. It’s what you are. I’ve knowed your kind since I was a boy. You’re in a category that ain’t got no name. Stay clear of us, partner. Next time around, I’ll forget my Christian upbringing.”

With that, he went outside and got into the SUV, Sonny Click in back, Candace behind the wheel. Troyce looked at the rainbow up in the hills, his hands relaxed between his legs, and waited for Candace to start the engine. His face contained the benign expression it always took on when he went to a private place in his mind that he didn’t allow others to enter.

“Something go wrong in there?” Candace said.

“Not a thing. Let’s drop off the reverend.”

“Then what are we gonna do?” she asked.

“Go up to the res and buy you the prettiest Indian jewelry in West Montana,” he replied. “Then have a couple of them buffalo burgers and huckleberry milk shakes.”

He put his big hand on the nape of her neck and brushed the stiffness of her hair against her scalp, like he was stroking the clipped mane on a pony.

CLETE PURCEL HADgiven up on sleep, at least since he had been sapped with a blackjack, wrist-cuffed to the base of a pine tree, and forced to listen to a machine scrape his grave out of a hillside. He kept his night-light on and his piece under his pillow and slept in fitful increments. The trick was not to set the bar too high. If you thought of sleep in terms of minutes rather than hours, you could always keep ahead of the game. In a tropical country years ago, Bed-Check Charlie had arched blooker rounds through the canopy at odd intervals during the night, blowing geysers of dirt and foliage into the air, ensuring that Clete’s squad would be exhausted at sunrise when they resumed humping sixty-pound packs in heat and humidity that felt like damp wool wrapped on the skin. Then Clete would hear the throbbing sound of a Cobra coming in low over the canopy and a Gatling gun rattling inside the downdraft of the helicopter blades, and in the silence that followed, he would rest one meaty arm across his eyes and tell himself that Bed-Check Charlie had been put out of business, that all he had to do was sleep for the next twenty minutes and not think about tomorrow. The fact that Sir Charles was down in a spider hole waiting to set up again was irrelevant. You copped twenty minutes of Z’s and trusted the angels until you woke again.

But the images from the hillside in the Bitterroot Valley were worse than those from the war. As soon as Clete dropped off to sleep, he was powerless over the man with the sloshing gas can in his hand. He could hear the man whistling a tune behind his mask, gathering sticks and leaves, raining them on Clete’s head, dusting off his palms, taking an immense pleasure in the systematic deconstruction of someone’s soul.

Clete sat up in bed at two A.M., his eyes wide, his throat thick with phlegm. Three deer had just walked through Albert’s yard and knocked over the water sprinkler. Clete got up and removed a carton of milk from the icebox and drank it in a deep chair that looked out on the valley. He could see the outcroppings of rock and the silhouette of the trees on the hilltops, the wind bending the trees against the starlight. But the windswept loveliness of the night sky and the alpine topography were of no help to him. He put his face in his hands, and when he drew in his breath, it sounded as ragged as a fish bone in his throat.

When he woke in the morning, he was wired to the eyes, a pressure band tightening across one side of his head. The clinical term for the syndrome is “psychoneurotic anxiety.” It’s almost untreatable, because its causes are armor-plated and deep-seated down in the bottom of the id. The level of tension is not unlike what you feel at the exact moment you realize you have stepped on a pressure-activated antipersonnel mine. Or if you have to open the door on an abandoned refrigerator in a vacant lot five days after a child has disappeared from the neighborhood. Or if your job requires you to climb out on a fourteenth-story ledge in order to dissuade a jumper who is determined to take her infant child with her. The analogies are not exaggerated. The tension is such that at one time patients who suffered from it were lobotomized with their full consent.