James Burke - Swan Peak

When it was over, I could hear no sound other than the wind in the grass outside and the hammering of my blood in my ears. When I kissed her again on the mouth, her fingers were wrapped in my hair, her body damp with sweat, our bedsheets imprinted with a moment I never wanted to leave.

That was when Albert knocked on the door and shouted that I’d had a phone call up at the main house.

“Who from?” I said from the bedroom as Molly drew the sheet over her breasts.

“She didn’t say. She said she’d call back in ten minutes,” he called through the screen. “She had an accent like a twanging bobby pin. She also sounded a little bit hysterical. Caller ID blocked. I’d leave her the hell alone. Message delivered. Adios.”

I dressed and went up to the main house. The phone rang in the kitchen just as Albert opened the front door. He went back to his office, and I picked up the receiver.

“Hello?” I said.

“Mr. Robicheaux?” a woman’s voice asked.

“What can I do for you, Ms. Wellstone?” I said.

“It’s Jamie Sue,” she replied, either correcting or not hearing me. “We’re in terrible trouble.”

“Who’s the ‘we’?”

“I think I’ve been betrayed. I think my husband found out.”

“About what?”

She hesitated. “I was supposed to meet Jimmy Dale. I bought a car for us and had it delivered by somebody I trusted. But I can’t leave the compound. All our cars are gone. Ridley and Leslie’s security men won’t take me anywhere, either.”

“Call 911,” I said.

“And tell them I’m meeting an escaped convict?”

“I can’t help you.”

“They’ve set up a trap. Clete doesn’t answer his cell. They’re going to kidnap or kill Jimmy Dale.”

“Where did you have the car delivered?”

She gave me the name of a bar on the Flathead res and described the vehicle.

“You said someone betrayed you.”

“I paid Harold Waxman to buy the car and park it at the bar in Arlee,” she said.

“You paid the bartender at the club on the lake, the man now working for your husband?”

“I thought he was my friend. It’s not my fault. I thought he was loyal. I can’t believe he sold us out.”

“What do you know about Waxman?”

“Nothing. He was a fan and an admirer. Maybe I’m wrong about him. Maybe Lyle Hobbs followed him. Maybe Harold is innocent. I don’t know what I’m saying anymore.”

I couldn’t help but wonder if her sense of betrayal had less to do with an individual than her discovery that fame and celebrity are cheap currency and seldom purchase loyalty in others. I wanted to ask why she hadn’t stuck by Jimmy Dale when he went to prison and why she had married into a collection of scum like the Wellstones. I wanted to ask if she ever felt remorse because she’d helped deceive the audiences who had bought in to Reverend Sonny Click’s charlatanism. I wanted to ask if she had ever thought about the suffering Seymour Bell and Cindy Kershaw had gone through before they died. But I already knew the answers I would get. Andy Warhol was dead wrong when he said every American is allowed fifteen minutes of fame. Fame comes to very few, and when it does, it takes on the properties of a narcotic and puts into abeyance our fears about our own mortality. Anyone who acquires a drug that potent does not give it up easily.

“Are you there?” she said.

“Clete knows nothing about your plan to run off with Jimmy Dale?” I said.

“No. Are you going to ask him to help?”

“Tell me, Ms. Wellstone, does it bother you at all that you’re asking a man you slept with to help you leave your husband and run off with a third man? No, let me rephrase that. Does anything at all bother you except the fact that you screwed up your life?”

“Yes, quite a few things bother me, Mr. Robicheaux. I deserted Jimmy Dale when he needed me most, and I married a monster. Now I have a little boy who may fall into the hands of the most evil people I’ve ever known. If you condemn me for it, I’ve earned every bit of your scorn and then some.”

The side of my face felt as though it had been stung by a bee when I replaced the receiver in the cradle.

“YOU SURE THISis the place?” Candace asked as she and Troyce pulled off the narrow asphalt road in the middle of the Jocko Valley. A bar built of logs and topped with a peaked red roof was set back from the road, a few vehicles parked in front, the windows lit with neon beer signs.

“It’s got to be. There’s only one or two bars here,” he said.

“How do you know what the car looks like?”

“The waitress told me. The bartender came by the café with it.”

Troyce drove the pickup around the back of the log building, leaning forward to see beyond a parked tractor rig. His face was gray under his hat, the skin around his eyes whiter than it should have been. He cleared his throat and spit out the window.

Candace touched his cheek with the back of her wrist. “You’re sick,” she said.

He didn’t argue. All the way from Swan Lake, a pain like a shard of glass had been working its way through his viscera, causing him on a couple of occasions to suck in his breath as though his skin had been touched with a hot wire.

He pointed through the windshield. “Look yonder – a white Camry, just like she said.”

Candace had hoped they wouldn’t find it, that Troyce would give up his anger and pride and stubbornness and let go of his obsession with a man who perhaps someday he would meet on the street and smile at and shake hands with and feel neither ashamed nor resentful about. Candace looked around at the great empty bowl of the valley they were in, the Mission Mountains rising straight up into the sky, leviathan and green and so massive she thought they would crack the earth where they stood. The sun had reddened behind the smoke from forest fires and the thunderclouds building in the west, and the air smelled of dust and chaff blowing out of the fields. She thought she could smell rain in the air, too, although only an hour earlier, the sky had been clear and hot, the treetops glazed with heat. Now a shadow seemed to be slipping across the land from one end of the Jocko Valley to the other.

“This doesn’t feel right, Troyce,” she said.

“What don’t?”

“Everything – this place, that car, the way the light is changing, those dark clouds moving across the valley.”

“It’s probably just one of them dry electric storms. All snap, crackle, and pop, and not one drop of rain.”

“What do you know about that bartender? You said you knew a dishonest man when you saw one. Why do you trust what the waitress says? You like her boobs?”

“Cut that stuff out.”

“Then start thinking about what we’re doing.”

“It ain’t that complicated, darlin’. Jamie Sue Wellstone got that idiot to help her run away with an escaped felon. That makes the idiot a felon, too. But he ain’t figured that out yet. You know why criminals are criminals? It’s ’cause most of them majored in dumb.”

Troyce parked the truck thirty yards from the Camry and cut the engine. He closed and opened his eyes as though he were dropping through an elevator shaft.

“We need to take you to a hospital,” she said.

“I just need to hit the can. Come inside.”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Sitting at the bar by myself in a joint on the res on Saturday afternoon? Duh !”

She watched him enter the back of the bar. Two Indian men who looked like father and son came out the side door. Both of them wore braided pigtails on their shoulders. They got into the cab of a flatbed and drove away, neither of them looking directly at her. She watched their vehicle disappear down the highway, over a rise, dipping into the sun, straw blowing off the bed of the truck. She wondered if they were going home to a Saturday-evening meal with the members of their family gathered around the table, an unwatched television set playing in the living room, the mountains gold and purple against the sunset. She wondered if a time would come when the simplest activities of others would not make her covetous.