James Burke - Swan Peak

What tore it for Quince was cleaning up in Jamie Sue’s bathroom. A small straw basket was filled with lipstick-smeared Kleenex. A plastic receptacle by the toilet contained her used tampons. Her fingernail clippings lay in a spray on the black marble countertop. Strands of her hair had to be pulled out of the drain with his fingers. A Q-tip blackened with eyeliner was stuck to the base of the toilet stool.

The chef had given Quince plastic covers for his feet but none for his hands. Thanks a lot, motherfucker .

When he finished cleaning Jamie Sue’s bathroom, he pulled the laden leaf bag down the back stairs, the garbage inside thudding heavily on each step. He opened the iron lid on the Dumpster and dropped the bag inside, a cloud of gnats and the smell of a week’s rotting produce rising with the heat into his face. He slammed the lid down as loudly as he could, hoping the sound reverberated through the wall into the house.

But his wishes were fulfilled in a way he hadn’t foreseen. When he turned around, Leslie Wellstone was staring at him, a frosted mint julep clutched in his right hand. “You out of sorts about something, Quince?” he said.

Quince could feel words forming in his mind that he had never spoken to a man of Leslie Wellstone’s background, words requiring an intimacy and a reciprocity of trust that he realized, for the first time in his life, he actually feared.

“Speak up. Are you not feeling well?” Leslie said.

“What would you do if folks spit on you, Mr. Wellstone? If they treated you like a nigra or white trash or like you didn’t have any dignity in their eyes?”

“Me? That’s a good question. Let me think on it a minute. Why, I don’t really know, Quince. It must be awful when somebody does that to a person,” Leslie replied.

You don’t even know what I’m asking you, do you ? Quince said to himself. Shows how goddamn smart any of y’all are .

“I’d like to help you, Quince, but you got into it with that big fellow from Texas on your own,” Leslie said. “Why not just file charges against him? You’re not afraid of him, are you? That couldn’t be the case, could it?” Leslie Wellstone lifted his julep glass to his mouth and drank, his eyes brightening.

“Nobody disrespects a Whitley and gets away with it,” Quince said.

But Leslie Wellstone had lost interest in the conversation, and he went back into the house without replying. When he pulled the door into place behind him, the rubber seal along the jamb hissed from the compression of air inside. A fire had broken out above Swan Lake, and the bottoms of the clouds along the mountaintop had turned a soft red from the flames’ updraft. Quince felt as though ants were crawling across his brain.

Hurt them all, one by one, in ways they’ve never been hurt before , a voice inside him said. Get to Mr. Leslie Wellstone last, the way you save out a dessert. See if he’s got that smirk on his mouth then .

But where to start?

Quince walked toward the garage apartment he shared with Lyle Hobbs. What did the man from West Texas own that he couldn’t bear to lose?

Quince’s answer to his own question created an image in his mind that made him close his eyes and wet his lips, like a hungry man about to begin a fine meal.

LATE THE NEXTafternoon, Candace Sweeney dressed by the bed while Troyce was showering. Through the open door, she could see his used bandages in the wastebasket. They were dry, unspotted by blood, and had been that way for three days. For the first time she began to believe that Troyce would heal in both body and spirit and that an opportunity was at hand for the two of them to simply step through a door into a life that would have no connection to their pasts.

“You believe in karma?” she said through the door.

He turned off the water and began drying himself on top of the bath mat. His body was pink from the shower heat, the hard contours of his chest and ribs and the flatness of his stomach a study in power and masculinity, his wounds like black zippers on his skin.

“Karma is for people looking for excuses, if you ask me,” he said.

“There’s different kinds of karma,” Candace said. “It’s like people’s lives are supposed to intersect, but not because that’s their fate. The intersection is the place where they make the choice that results in their fate. See?”

“No.”

“It means a certain kind of fate doesn’t have to be ours. It means there are people we’re destined to meet. It’s them that lets us choose the door we’re supposed to walk through.”

“Where’d you get all this stuff?” he said, smiling, wiping at his hair with the towel.

“From a guy who used to smoke dope with us in Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland.”

“You’re cute,” he said.

“You don’t take me seriously sometimes, Troyce.”

“Always,” he said, placing a towel on the bedspread, then sitting down nude next to her. He put his arm around her shoulders. “You’ve got the prettiest-shaped face of any woman I ever knowed. I love your tattoos, too. Not many women look good tattooed, but you do.”

She placed her hand on his thigh. She could smell the clean odor of his hair and feel the heat his skin gave off. “We could just go away. Pack it up and start all over,” she said.

“Where?”

“Washington or Oregon. We could open a café in the Cascades for tourists and loggers. I’m a good cook, Troyce. I know everything there is about food service. The key to a café’s success is having a good cook and making sure your suppliers aren’t cheating you. You’d be good at managing a café. You ever been to the Cascades?”

“I don’t see that happening right now.”

She thought a long time before she spoke again. “Troyce?”

“What is it, you little honey bunny?”

“You’re in over your head.”

“Not to my mind, I ain’t.”

“Messing with rich people like the Wellstones? Think you’re gonna come up here and write the rules with people like that?”

“You ain’t got to tell me about the likes of the Wellstones. I knowed their kind all my life.”

“Your wounds are healing up now. Isn’t that a sign?”

“Of what?”

“Those choices I was talking about. The fate that’s waiting for us if we’ll just reach out and take it.”

“The choice right now is what kind of steak we’re gonna order at that club up yonder.”

He patted her on the back, then slipped on his boxer shorts and began combing his hair in front of the mirror.

“You want me to put on fresh bandages for you?” she asked, her face blank now, all of her arguments used up.

“Don’t worry about them rich people. They ain’t interested in folks like us. We ain’t got nothing they want,” Troyce said.

“We went to their house. We told them we know their business. You told them you beat up one of their employees. They won’t forget it,” she said.

He stopped combing his hair and looked at her reflection in the mirror.

Ten minutes later, when they were about to leave, someone with a heavy fist knocked hard on the door. Candace peeked through the window curtain. A man with sandy blond hair and a scar that ran through one eyebrow waited in front of the door. He wore a porkpie hat and a Hawaiian shirt that was almost bursting at the shoulders. A semi passed on the road, and the man turned and watched it disappear around a bend. The back of his neck was oily and pockmarked. His whole body seemed to be supercharged by energies that it could barely contain.

“Who is it?” Troyce said to Candace.

“A guy who looks like a cop or a bill collector,” she replied.