James Burke - Swan Peak

Our weapons remained a few feet away, inside the Caddy, as useless to us as pieces of scrap iron. The man with the Mac-10 pushed us both against the car hood and shook us down, while the other man from the pickup truck held a cut-down pump on us. The man with the Mac-10 was especially invasive toward Clete. After he found a switchblade Velcro-strapped to Clete’s ankle, he felt inside his thighs, working his hand hard into Clete’s scrotum.

Clete twisted his head around, his legs spread, his arms stretched on the hood. “When this is over, I’m going to be looking you up,” he said.

“They’re clean,” the man with the Mac-10 said to Leslie, ignoring Clete’s remark.

“Clasp your fingers behind your heads and let’s take a walk, gentlemen,” Leslie said.

And that’s what we did, like humiliated prisoners of war, walking up the incline, the pickup following behind us with Ridley and Jamie Sue inside. I couldn’t believe how our fortunes had turned around so quickly. Was it stupidity, naïveté, professional incompetence, or just bad luck? No, you don’t try to jack up a Cadillac convertible and turn it in a circle on an uphill slope in an electric storm with a heavy gun like a 1911-model forty-five auto stuck in your belt or a thirty-eight shoulder harness wrapped around your chest and shoulders. We simply screwed up on the identification of Troyce Nix’s vehicle. In the bad light, the dark blue of Nix’s truck resembled the purple paint job on the Wellstone vehicle. It happens. We called Vietnam the “sorry-about-that war.” I just hated to have a repeat of the experience on a hillside above a lake in an electric storm in western Montana.

But where was Troyce Nix? He had followed us all the way up the highway along the side of Flathead Lake, then had disappeared. As we trudged up the slope through the trees, I knew Clete was thinking the same thoughts.

“We got to get them distracted,” he said under his breath. “Nix is out there somewhere.”

“How do you know?” I said.

“The girl. He won’t rest till he gets the girl back,” Clete said.

“Shut up, fat man,” the man with the Mac-10 said.

“Blow me, you prick,” Clete replied.

The man with the Mac-10 walked closer to Clete, leaning forward slightly, his professional restraint slipping for the first time. His body was hard and compact, like that of a gymnast, his hair mowed military-style, balding through the pate. His skin seemed luminescent in the shadows created by the headlights of the pickup following us, his lips taking on a purplish cast. “For me, it’s usually just business. But I’m gonna enjoy this one,” he said.

“I think I know you,” Clete said.

“Yeah? From where?”

“A hot-pillow joint for losers in Honolulu. You were standing in line to screw your mother. I’m sure of it.”

“Tell me that joke again in about fifteen minutes,” the man with the Mac-10 replied.

JIMMY DALE GREENWOODcould smell the rawness of the freshly dug pit in which he lay, the severed tree roots, the water leaking out of the scalped sides, the cold odor of broken stone, and he knew, even though his eyes were taped, that his greatest fear, the one that had pursued him all his life, was about to be realized: In the next few minutes, he would be buried alive.

He kept twisting and jerking at the tape that bound his wrists, but it was wound deeply into the skin, cutting off the blood in the veins, numbing his fingers and palms. Troyce Nix’s woman lay next to him, but there was a third person in the pit, and Jimmy Dale had no idea who the person was or why he or she had been put there. He could hear the voices of the men who had abducted him in the cargo van, and the voice of the man who had dragged him from the van and flung him into the pit. He could also smell the stench of diesel exhaust and the odor of electric lights smoking in the mist.

He tried to reach inside himself for the strength to accept whatever ordeal lay in store for him. He remembered all the great challenges in his life that in one way or another he had mastered and come out on the other side of: a horse named Bad Whiskey that he rode to the buzzer in Vegas with two broken ribs; his first appearance on a stage, at an amateur competition in Bandera, Texas, when he was so frightened his voice broke and his fingers shook on the frets but he finished the song regardless and won a third-place ribbon; the time he tied himself down with a suicide wrap on a bull that slung him into the boards and whipped two extra inches on his height; and the biggest crossroads of all, the day he decided to get a shank and end the abuse visited upon him by Troyce Nix.

But all those milestones in his life, or the degree of victory over fear they may have represented, had been of no help in overcoming his nightmares about premature burial. Now the nightmare was about to become a reality. Once, in a beery fog at a roach motel outside Elko, Nevada, he had flicked on the television set and inadvertently started watching a documentary about the atrocities committed during the Chinese civil war between the nationalists and the communists. Peasants with their hands bound behind them had been laid out in rows and were being buried alive, a shovelful at a time, the dirt striking their faces while they pleaded in vain for mercy.

Jimmy Dale had never rid himself of that image, and now he was at the bottom of a pit, waiting to become one of the images he had seen in that grainy black-and-white film years ago.

He felt a hand touch his wrist and pull against the tape. It was the woman; she had gotten her fingers on the tip of the tape and was peeling back a long strand from his wrist.

“Can you hear me?” she whispered.

“Yes,” he said, the word barely audible behind the tape that covered his mouth.

“Don’t move, don’t talk. I’ll get you loose,” she said.

He heard footsteps and other voices by the pit, and he felt the woman’s hand go limp.

“You’re putting a mask on?” Layne said.

“What about it?”

“Why do you put on a mask if we all know what you look like?”

“Because I like to.”

“Each to his own, huh?”

“You seem to have a lot of comments to make about what other people do.”

“No sir, I don’t. I’m sorry if I gave that impression.”

“You’re sorry, all right. You don’t know how sorry you really are.”

Layne was obviously not sure what he was being told. Nor did he seem to know how to respond. “There’s some lights coming up the road,” he said.

“You figured that out, did you?”

“I got nothing else to say to you, man.”

“You were watching the girl, weren’t you, thinking about what’s going to happen to her?”

“I was gonna have a smoke.”

“No, you were imagining her fate. But you don’t have the courage to make that fate happen, do you?”

“Buddy, I won’t say another word to you. I got no issue with what you do.”

“No issue? You mimic the language of people who don’t have brains.”

The speaker walked away, his footsteps heavy, booted, a man whose movements and speech were all in exact measure to his purpose. Jimmy Dale heard Layne exhale.

WE CAME OVERa knoll and walked down into a depression that was flanked on either side by fir and larch trees. Ahead, the road climbed again, and just beyond the spot where it peaked, I could see a glow shining upward through the trees, and I knew this was the place where all the roads Clete and I had followed for a lifetime had finally converged. Leslie Wellstone and the man with the Mac kept behind us, their shoes padding softly on the layer of wet pine needles that carpeted the ground, the truck with Jamie Sue and Ridley Wellstone and the other hired man bringing up the rear.