James Burke - Swan Peak

Not seventy-five years ago, it wouldn’t have been , I thought. But I kept my own counsel. “How much does a Dobro like that cost?” I asked.

“I don’t remember,” he replied, drumming the pads of his fingers on the tabletop. When I didn’t speak, he shifted his eyes onto mine. “Something else?”

“Yeah. Can you play ‘Cimarron’ again?”

MOLLY WAS SPRINKLINGthe flowers in the window boxes with a watering can when I got back to our cabin. To the south, rain was falling in the valley, and in the sunlight it looked like spun glass on the trees that grew along the slopes. “I just tried to thank J. D. Gribble for saving Clete’s life. He wasn’t interested,” I said.

“Maybe he’s a humble man,” she said.

“He owns an antique Dobro. It must be worth thousands of dollars. You ought to hear him sing. His voice is beautiful. Why’s a guy like that shoveling horse flop in Lolo, Montana?”

“Did you see Clete?” she asked, changing the subject.

“No, why?”

“I just wondered,” she said.

I waited. She moved the watering can back and forth over the pansies in the window boxes, her face empty.

“What’s he done now?” I asked.

“I didn’t say he’d done anything. Besides, it’s time to stop micromanaging his life, Dave.”

“Will you stop this?”

“That FBI woman was there. She left and then came back. His secretary in New Orleans couldn’t reach him, so she called me on my cell. I went down to his apartment. No answer to the knock. Nobody in the living room or the kitchenette. As quietly as possible, I walked back here and didn’t look over my shoulder. Later, the two of them drove off in her car. Is that detailed enough?”

“You’re kidding?”

“It’s his life. We need to butt out, troop.”

“In the sack with the FBI? While she’s on duty? I can’t believe it.”

“Remind me not to have this type of conversation with you again,” she said.

But Molly didn’t get it. The problem wasn’t Clete’s romantic entanglement with a federal agent; the problem was the long-dormant investigation into the plane crash that had killed Sally Dio and his fellow lowlifes. In the eyes of some, Clete was still a suspect, and he had just managed to swim back onto the radar in the most annoying fashion he could think up.

“ What ?” she said, setting down the watering can on the porch. She was wearing a sundress, and in the shade, her freckled skin had a pale, powdery luminescence that made my heart quicken.

I smiled at her. “Clete is just Clete, isn’t he?” I said.

“Dave, you’re so crazy,” she replied.

I went inside and put on a pair of gym shorts, my running shoes, and a T-shirt, then jogged down the road toward the highway. The sun shower had stopped and the air smelled cool and fresh, like mowed hay. A family of wild turkeys was drinking from the horse tank in Albert’s pasture, the male and female fluttering up on the aluminum rim with their chicks, the horses watching the show.

I hit it hard for half a mile, running through the dappled shade of cottonwoods, chipmunks skittering in the rocks up on the hillside, the great hulking presence of Lolo Peak rising into the sky by the Idaho line. It was a grand morning, the kind that makes you feel you shouldn’t look beyond the day you have, that it’s enough simply to be at work and play in the fields of the Lord. But I could not rid myself of my worries about Clete Purcel, nor could I stop thinking about the ordeal he had suffered on the mountainside Saturday night down in the Bitterroots.

Who was the culprit? God only knew. I’ve known sadists, sexual predators, and serial killers of every stripe. In my opinion, no matter what behavioral psychologists say, none of them fits a profile with any appreciable degree of exactitude or predictability. Searching their backgrounds for environmental explanations is a waste of time. Deprivation, abuse in the home, and alcoholism and drug addiction in the family may be factors, but they’re not the cause. Turn the situation around. In the Western world, who were the worst monsters of the twentieth century? Who tortured with glee and murdered with indifference? Stalin was an ex-seminarian. The people who fired the ovens in Auschwitz were baptized Christians.

The truth is, no one knows what makes psychopaths. They don’t share their secrets. Nor do they ever confess their crimes in their entirety, lest the confessions rob them of their deeds and the power over others those deeds have given them.

I had no doubt the man in the mask was out there, biding his time, waiting to catch Clete in an unguarded moment or vulnerable situation. Sadists and serial killers feed on trust and naïveté and do not like to be undone by their adversaries. As long as Clete remained alive, he would represent failure to the man who had tried to burn him to death.

I rounded a bend in the road and slowed to a walk in the shade of cottonwoods, my skin cool and glazed with sweat, my heart steady, my breath coming easy in my lungs. The wind was ruffling through the canopy, the sky an immaculate translucent blue, as bright and flawless as silk. I didn’t want to think any more about serial killers, about violent men and cupidity and the manipulation for political ends of uneducated and poor people whose religion was expropriated and used to hurt them. I only wanted to disconnect from the world as it is, or at least as I have come to know it.

Just when I had convinced myself that it was possible to live inside the moment, that neither the past nor the future should be allowed to lay claim to it, I saw an SUV headed toward me, a tall man in a pearl-gray western hat in the passenger seat, a woman driving.

The woman lifted a hand in recognition as they passed, then continued up the road and turned in to Albert’s driveway. The man wore a grin at the corner of his mouth, a bit like John Wayne.

ALBERT HOLLISTER KEPThis office on the main floor of his home, with a view that looked out on his barn and northern pasture and an arroyo behind the house. His bookshelves extended from the floor to the ceiling. The shelves by his writing desk were littered with Indian arrowheads and pottery shards, fifty-eight-caliber minié balls, a milk-glass doorknob from the bathroom of Boss Tweed, switchblade and trench knives, a tomahawk, nineteenth-century telegraph transformers, an IWW button, goatskin wine bags from Pamplona, and a deactivated World War II hand grenade. The office also contained a glass case for his published books and short stories and another case for his guns, which included an M16, a twelve-gauge pump, an ’03 Springfield, a ’94 lever-action Winchester, and a half-dozen sidearms.

When the couple parked the SUV by the side door, Albert was writing a short story in longhand, his thoughts deep inside the Texas City disaster of 1947. In his mind, he saw a mushroom cloud of smoke and flame rise from the Monsanto chemical plant, generating heat so great that the water in the harbor boiled. He saw liquid flame rain down in umbrella fashion on an oil field, setting off wellheads and natural-gas storage tanks like strings of firecrackers. Then the man and woman from the SUV knocked on the French doors, peering at him through the glass, the man shading the glare with one hand so he could see more clearly into Albert’s office. When Albert didn’t rise from his writing desk, the man tapped a knuckle on the glass.

“What do you want?” Albert said, getting up and opening the door.

“My name is Troyce Nix,” the man said. “We’re looking for a man by the name of Jimmy Dale Greenwood.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” Albert said.

“Can we come in a minute?” the man asked.

“What for?”