James Burke - Swan Peak

“Pretty sharp thinking, Clete. Except it’s not me who couldn’t keep his johnson in his pants when he met Jamie Sue Wellstone.”

He laughed, looking at me sideways, the Caddy dipping into a huge hole, shuddering the frame, throwing both of us against our seat straps. “What was I supposed to do? Hurt her feelings?”

“Don’t ever go into analysis,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Your psychiatrist will shoot himself.”

But he was smiling at me, not listening, not caring what I said one way or another, indifferent to all the minutiae that had gone into the ebb and flow of our lives, remembering only the bond we had shared over the decades, the wounds we had suffered and survived together, the flags under which we had fought and the causes we had served, many of which were no longer considered of import by others.

“We painted our names on the wall, didn’t we?” he said.

“You’d better believe it, Cletus,” I replied.

I looked through the back window and thought I saw headlights glimmering in the trees. Then they disappeared. The rain swept westward across the timber, bending the canopy, channeling serpentine rivulets in the road.

We were high enough that I could make out lights on the far side of Swan Lake, like beacons inside ocean fog. I suspected the lights came from the nightclub on the shore, but I couldn’t be sure. I thought of the photograph of Bugsy Siegel and Virginia Hill mounted on the wall behind the club’s bar, and I wondered why such criminals beckoned to us from the past, why they were able to lay such a strong romantic claim upon us. Was it because secretly we wanted to emulate them, to possess their power, to burn that brightly inside the mist, incandescent as they pursued all the trappings of the American dream, just as we did? Was it because the art deco world of 1940s Hollywood and the sweet sewer it represented were as much a part of our culture as the graves of Shiloh?

Clete rolled down his window halfway, and the rain blew inside. “Listen,” he said.

“What?” I said, waking from my reverie.

“I thought I heard a piece of heavy equipment working. You hear it?”

“No,” I replied.

“Maybe I’m going nuts. I still hear that motherfucker who tried to set fire to me.”

I rolled down my window and looked at our headlight beams bouncing off the tree trunks, but I could not see anything unusual or hear any sound except the wind sharking through the canopy and a solitary peal of thunder across the sky.

JAMIE SUE COULDnot understand her own thoughts. She had stayed in the barn, her cell phone in her jeans, grooming the horses, listening to the rip of thunder across the skies and the rain mixed with hail that was clattering on the barn’s metal roof. Leslie or one of the servants carrying out his orders had removed all the vehicle keys from the hooks in the mudroom. His and Ridley’s security personnel had tripled in number in the last week, men who dressed neatly and were barbered and clean-shaved and were deferential but, she guessed, also more professionally criminal than either Quince Whitley or Lyle Hobbs. In retrospect, Lyle seemed like an amateur, perhaps another Judas for sale, blowing the compound with whiskey on his breath and a tic in his eyes like that of a crystal addict, but by comparison, a bumbling amateur.

Jamie Sue had never understood why Leslie had hired Lyle. It seemed to have something to do with their common experience in Vegas or Reno, or other marginal enterprises the Wellstones dabbled in as part of the price they paid for doing business in what they considered a corrupt culture.

She had taken little Dale into the barn with her and unrolled a plastic tarp on the floor for him to play on. But the two of them were trapped, with no means of escape, and she had no idea where Jimmy Dale was or the fate that might be awaiting him if he had been abducted by Ridley and Leslie’s goons. She felt a terrible sense of urgency, as though she were drowning in full view of others and no one on the bank could hear her voice. Or was that just her melodramatic daytime-television mentality kicking into gear?

No, time was running out, and not simply on this situation on this particular Saturday in the summer of 2007, she thought.

The choices she had made over the years all had a consequence and a cost, and the bills were coming due. She should have toughed it out by herself when Jimmy Dale went to jail, staying loyal to him and accepting privation as her lot, just as her blind mother and disabled father had. What would have been the worst thing to happen if she had gone it on her own? Second-class-celebrity status as an aging honky-tonk performer? Living in a trailer? Putting up with over-the-hill, drunk truck drivers who wanted her to sing “Dim Lights, Thick Smoke (And Loud, Loud Music)”?

The list of things she should not have done was long. She shouldn’t have married her community-college English professor and used his alcoholism to sue him in divorce court for almost everything he owned. She shouldn’t have posed as a religious woman and deceived the crowds who flocked to Sonny Click’s revivals. She shouldn’t have used her sexuality to manipulate uneducated family men who trusted her. She shouldn’t have used Leslie, and she shouldn’t have pretended she had married him in order to care for Dale.

It was the last thought that bothered her most. Everything she’d done had been a justification for her own agenda. She had even used her little boy as an excuse, when in reality, she had loved all the benefits of marriage to a man like Leslie Wellstone – the limos and luxury cars and private planes, the palatial estates, the servants who attended her every need, the awe and respect and diffidence she created with her presence wherever she went. In the meantime, she had lost her music, the one element in her life she had treated as a votive gift and had not compromised for the sake of either celebrity or commercial success. In her earlier career, she had continued to sing in the traditions of Skeeter Davis and Kitty Wells while everybody else in Nashville was going uptown, then somewhere along the way, she had forgotten who she was and what she was and had taken the gift for granted and used it to manipulate people into voting against their own interests.

She remembered a statement that Keith Richards once made regarding a famous R amp;B musician whose hostility to his own audience hid just beneath his skin: “Chuck’s tragedy is he doesn’t realize how much joy he brings to other people.”

Her head was dizzy, her hands dry and hard to close.

She began brushing a mahogany-black gelding in his stall, raking burrs out of his mane and forelock, rubbing him under the jaw, touching the graceful line and smoothness of his neck, talking in a reassuring voice in his ear. The gelding was four now but still hot-wired and subject to spooking and rearing in dry mustard weed, and neither Ridley nor Leslie would ride him. But Jamie Sue could and did, sometimes without a saddle, using only a hackamore to rein him.

Ownership of a fine horse came with ability, not legal title, Jimmy Dale always said. He said no one owned the sunrise or the rain, or mesas and mountains, or the bluebonnets of South Texas. Your claim to ownership of the earth was based on the six feet of dirt that went into your face. The rest of it was a grand playground that God had given to all His children. At least that was what Jimmy Dale and his peyote-soaked friends said.

She wondered if her thoughts amounted to what a theologian would call contrition. She decided they probably did not. But perhaps they were a start.

She picked up Dale from the tarp and set him like a clothespin on the gelding’s back, keeping her arm around his waist to steady him. “I’m going to get you your own pony one day,” she said. “Maybe back in Texas, where your grandma and granddaddy used to live and your mama grew up.”