James Burke - Swan Peak

Candace and Troyce spoke about little of consequence during the ride through Bigfork and down the two-lane that bordered the eastern shore of Flathead Lake. The day was bright, the wind drowsy and warm, the surface of the lake a hot blue, the highway full of vacationers on their way to Glacier Park.

“I think maybe you ought to drop me at the bus depot,” she said. “Time I fired myself as your number one douche bag and box of Valium.”

“Okay, here it is, little darlin’. I told you that bartender was a Judas of some kind, that he put me in mind of an egg-sucking dog hanging around a brooder house?” he said. “I followed him yesterday and today and was about to give up. Then I went into the café at the lake and had coffee. This waitress in there who tried to come on to me before says, ‘You still want to drive me home, Tex?’ I go, ‘I thought the bartender or your husband drove you home.’ She goes, ‘My husband is drunk, and Harold is running errands for Ms. Wellstone down at Arlee or something.’”

“You’re telling me you tried to pick up a waitress?” Candace said.

“ Nooo ,” he said, drawing out the word. “I’m not saying that at all. I was trying to get information from her. The waitress told me this guy Harold Waxman – that’s the bartender – was delivering a car to a bar in Arlee this afternoon, and she didn’t have a ride home from work. That car is for Jimmy Dale Greenwood. He’s blowing the country, and maybe he’s taking the Wellstone woman and his kid with him.”

“So all this time you’ve been talking about Glacier Park and the Cascades and starting up our café, you’ve really been planning on getting even with this guy? I think this pretty much does it for me, Troyce.”

“You’re not listening,” he said. “I’m going down to Arlee for one reason. It’s to look Jimmy Dale in the face and tell him I wouldn’t dirty my hands by giving him the beating he deserves. If I don’t do that, I’ll never have no peace.”

“You’re not gonna have any peace till you admit something else, either.”

“Like what?”

“That you made that guy’s life awful.”

“You still want to go to the depot?”

“Maybe,” she replied.

He glanced sideways at her, the right front wheel of the truck skidding rocks off the embankment into the water far below.

“No, I don’t want to go to the depot. You have a cinder block for a head, but you’re a good man. Your problem is, you don’t believe in the one person who tells you that,” she said. “That’s how come you hurt me.”

She saw the confusion in his expression. Then his face emptied and he looked straight ahead at the road, as though a solitary thought dominated all his senses and gave him a respite from the sounds constantly grinding inside his head. “People like us ain’t supposed to be apart, Candace. If you ever run off from me, I won’t never be the same, and I won’t never find nobody like you. That’s the way it is. After today, we’re gonna have the perfect life. I promise. I ain’t gonna hurt that man. You’ll see.”

MOLLY HAD PICKEDa bouquet of lupine, Indian paintbrush, asters, harebells, wild roses, and mock orange and placed them in a glass pitcher of water in the kitchen window. She was washing her hands at the sink, and the wind was blowing across the meadow, swelling the curtains, tousling her hair. She dried her hands and turned around. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she said.

“It’s a strange day. There’re locusts all over the pasture. I could hear them hitting on the screens this morning,” I replied.

“July is a dry month,” she said.

“Maybe,” I said. But how do you tell someone the light is wrong, that it’s too bright, that the glare is of a kind you associate with a desert, with heat that dries mud bricks into powder and makes rocks sharper than they should be and burning to the touch?

“You want to go downtown today? The street market is open by the train station,” she said.

“If you’d like to,” I said.

“What is it, Dave? What bothers you all the time?”

Nothing other than an oblong black hole, one that waits for all of us.

“Nothing. I’m fine,” I said.

“Why did you get up in the middle of the night and oil your gun?”

“Primitive people believed they could drive evil spirits from the grave by firing arrows at them. Oiling a sidearm under a reading lamp in the dark makes about as much sense.”

I saw a question mark form on her face, then dissolve into an expression of loss and incomprehension. I saw her chest rise and fall, her eyes go away from me and return. “For good or bad, no matter what happens, we’re in it together,” she said.

“You’re a stand-up guy, Molly.”

“A guy?”

But I wasn’t interested in rhetoric or verbal assurances or defining myself or my relationship with my wife or even trying to explain how the measure of one’s life finally reduces itself to the possession of the moment, then the moment after that, moving through each of them in sequence from day to day, letting go of yesterday and asking nothing from the future except to be there for it.

“Good guys forever,” I said.

“Pardon?” she said.

I locked my hands around her back and lifted her into the air and walked with her into the bedroom, the bottoms of her bare feet touching the tops of my shoes.

“What you doing, cap’n?” she said.

I pulled her dress over the top of her head and kissed her on the mouth. She sat down on the side of the bed, wearing only her panties and a bra. She glanced toward the window. The curtains were billowing in the wind, and dust was rising from the field and we could see the shadows of ravens racing across the tips of the grass. “You hear a clock ticking, Dave?” she said.

I looked around the room as though I didn’t quite understand.

“You know what I mean,” she said.

“Hemingway once said three days can be worth a lifetime if you live them right,” I said.

“Hemingway shot himself,” she replied.

“He left behind books that people will read as long as there are books,” I said.

“But maybe no one told him that. Or he didn’t listen to them when they did.” She lifted her eyes to mine.

“No one knows what goes on in the mind of a suicide, Molly. They don’t come back to tell us.”

The room was silent.

She finished undressing and lay down and waited for me, indifferent to the fact that someone might walk up on the porch, or that a recreational rider might come down a trail on the hillside, or perhaps, more important, no longer worried about the lack of resolution in our discussion or a lack of resolution in the latter part of our lives.

When I was inside Molly, I saw images behind my eyelids that seemed to have little to do with marital congress. I saw gossamer fans floating inside a coral cave, a field of red poppies hard by the sea, a glistening porpoise sliding through a wave. I could feel her heart beating against my chest, her breath puffing against my ear. I could smell her hair and the heat in her skin, like a fragrance of flowers at first light. But Molly’s greatest gift to me during those erotic moments was simply her touch, the presence of her body under me, the grace of her thighs, the tightness of her arm across my back, the steady pressure of her hand at the base of my spine.

There are occasions in this world when you’re allowed to step inside a sonnet, when clocks stop, and you don’t worry about time’s winged chariot and hands that beckon to you from the shadows.

Then I felt a sensation that was like a fissure splintering down the face of a stone dam, spreading through my loins, collapsing my insides, draining my heart, pushing the light out of my eyes. I tried to stop it from happening, to make it last longer, to bring Molly inside the intensity of the moment with me, but she tightened her thighs and drew me deeper inside her and bit my neck and made a sound perhaps like the Sirens did when they lay atop rocks jutting from an ancient sea.