DR17 - Swan Peak by James Lee Burke
It was V-J Day 1945, and my half brother, Jimmie, and I were safe in our home because our countrymen had driven both the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese from the earth. In the dream, I heard my father drive away in his stake truck, and I saw my mother look up the dirt road toward a parked Ford coupe. Sitting behind the steering wheel was a blade-faced man in a fedora who, like a scale-covered creature of long ago, patiently waited to enter our green-gold Eden on the bayou.
When I woke from the dream, I went into the kitchen and sat a long time in the darkness by myself. The sky was black, the rain thundering on the cabin’s roof. The dream was one I had carried with me from Louisiana and the Philippines to Vietnam. It dealt with a sense of loss that I knew I would never get over. My parents had done the worst thing human beings are capable of doing to themselves: They had destroyed their own home and all those in it, including themselves. But the dream was about more than my own family. The world in which I had grown up was gone. The country I live in is not the one of my birth. It might seem so to others, but it is not, no matter what they say.
Molly sat down beside me in the darkness. Before she married a sheriff’s detective with a history of alcoholism and violence, she had been a Catholic nun and nurse at Maryknoll missions in El Salvador and Guatemala, and had come to New Iberia to help organize the cane workers and build homes for the poor. She was wearing a white bathrobe, and when lightning flared above the mountains, she looked like an apparition. “Want to come back to bed?” she said.
“I think I’m up,” I said.
“Want me to start breakfast?”
“How about steak and eggs up at the truck stop?”
“Give me a minute,” she said, getting up from her chair, squeezing my shoulder.
I followed her into the bedroom. When she untied her robe and let it slip off her shoulders onto the bed, I could feel something drop inside me, like water draining through a hole in the bottom of a streambed, as if all the clocks in my life had suddenly accelerated and I couldn’t stop them. I put my arms around her and held her against me. Her shoulders and back were powdered with freckles, and her skin felt cool and smooth and warm under my hands, all at the same time. She had red hair, and it was thick and cropped on her neck, and it smelled of the perfume behind her ears. I squeezed her tight and bit her on the shoulder.
“You okay, Dave?” she said.
“Always,” I said.
LATER, WHILE MOLLY and Clete and Albert were in Missoula, I mucked out the stalls in Albert’s barn and scrubbed out the horse tank and refilled it with fresh water from the secondary well he had drilled in his pasture. By noon the chill had gone out of the morning, and the sky was a hard blue, the valley bright with sunshine, the trees a deep green from the rain. I saw a waxed black convertible, the top down, coming up the road, the driver steering straight over the mud puddles rather than around them. Three people were inside. When they stopped by the rail fence at the foot of the pasture, I had no doubt who they were.
I pulled off my gloves and walked to the fence. The driver was a gold-haired woman who wore blue contact lenses and a halter that barely contained her breasts. A tiny bluebird, its wings spread, was tattooed above one breast. The man in back had a pair of aluminum forearm crutches propped next to him on the seat. But it was the man in the passenger seat whose face caused one to either look away or to stare into neutral space so as not to offend.
I tipped my hat to the woman and waited.
“Is either Albert Hollister or Clete Purcel at home?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Could I give them a message?”
“You can give Mr. Purcel this,” the man in back said. He handed me a tubular fly-rod case, then gathered up a paper sack from the floor and handed that to me, too. “There’s a creel and line and a reel and a box of flies in there, the best in Bob Ward’s store. Tell him I’m sorry about his gear being accidentally busted up on my property. Tell him I hope all of us are shut of this, too.”
“Maybe you should tell him, Mr. Wellstone,” I said.
He ignored me and slapped the back of the driver’s seat. The woman dropped the gearshift in reverse and backed down the road toward Albert’s driveway, then turned the convertible around and headed for the state highway.
I went back to work in the barn, glad they were gone. But a moment later, the woman stopped the convertible and backed all the way down the dirt road until she reached the gate to the pasture. Ridley Wellstone got out on his aluminum crutches, unfastened the chain on the gate, and began working his way across the pasture toward me, the bottom of his crutches sinking into the soft detritus of manure and dirt and rotted hay. I picked up a wood chair out of the tack room and reached him just as he was about to topple sideways.
“Sit down, sir,” I said.
“I didn’t come all the way out here just to deliver fishing tackle. You tell Mr. Hollister I want to talk to him, man to man, face-to-face,” he said.
“Why don’t you leave Clete and Albert alone? They haven’t done anything to harm you.”
“Leave them alone? This man Purcel has been following my security personnel around. Albert Hollister and a group of tree huggers filed an injunction against me. I can’t drill test wells on my own ranch.” He looked at my expression. “You didn’t know that?”
“What are you test-drilling for?”
“Oil and natural gas, if it’s any of your business.”
“You want to open up oil production on the Swan River?”
“You listen, Mr. Robicheaux: Once people know money is under the ground, they’re going to extract it. The only question is how and by whom. Better some than others, that make sense to you?”
“Not really, but I’ll tell Albert and Clete what you said.”
“You might also tell them I’m not the Antichrist and to stop treating me like I am. This is a fine-looking place. What if I told Mr. Hollister he shouldn’t string horseshit all over it, less’n he wants an injunction against him?”
I tried to think of a response, but this time he had me.
He began clanking on his crutches toward the gate. Then one crutch sank six inches in a soft spot, and he fell sideways into the mud, landing hard. He stared up at me, the blood draining from his cheeks. I tried to lift him, but he was deadweight in my hands and obviously in severe pain.
“Is it sciatica?” I said.
I heard the woman and the man with the disfigured face coming across the pasture.
“Get me up,” he whispered.
“I think you need the paramedics,” I said.
“Don’t let me lie in the mud like this.”
I got both arms under him and pulled him erect, then sat him down in the chair I had brought from the tack room. His chest was heaving, his suit spotted and smeared with mud. “Thank you,” he said.
“We’ll need to drive the car into the pasture. You mind if we open the gate?” the woman said.
“Of course I don’t mind,” I replied.
She went back for the car. The man with the ruined face lit a cigarette and put it in Ridley Wellstone’s mouth. Then he fitted his right hand on Ridley’s shoulder. Two fingers on his hand were missing, and the skin was shriveled so that the bones were pinched together and looked as small as those in a dried monkey’s paw.
“I’m Leslie Wellstone, Ridley’s brother.”
I waited for him to offer his hand, but he didn’t. “I’m glad to meet you,” I said.
“The woman is Jamie Sue. She’s my wife.” There was a mirthful light in his eyes, one that was not pleasant to look at.
“I see.”
“You do?” he said.
I had no idea what he meant, and I didn’t want to find out.
“Get me up,” Ridley Wellstone said.
“Give Ridley a saddle, and he’ll be sitting on one of your horses,” the brother said. “That’s how he fixed up his back. Ridley goes from hell to breakfast and doesn’t stop for small talk.”
“I said get me up and
“How do you know my name?” I said.
Ridley Wellstone lifted his eyes to mine. “I know everything about you. You’ve killed over a half-dozen men.”
I felt my ears pop in the wind, or perhaps I heard a sound like a flag snapping on a metal pole. “Repeat that, please?”
He was breathing through his mouth; there were tiny flecks of spittle on his lips. “You’ve got blood splatter all over you,” he said. “Maybe you did it with a badge, but you’re a violent and dangerous man all the same. I don’t judge you for it. I just don’t want you dragging your grief into our lives.”
“What?” I said.
“I’ve known your kind all my life. Every one of you is a professional victim. If you had your way, we’d be studying Karl Marx instead of Thomas Jefferson. This whole country would be run by faggots and welfare recipients. A man of your experience and education knows this, but he’s at war with his own instincts. It’s nothing against you personal. I just want shut of you.”
I decided a little of the Wellstone family could go a long way.
CHAPTER 4
ONE MONTH EARLIER, on a piece of baked hardpan out in West Texas, within sight of the shimmering outline of the Van Horn Mountains, a convict by the name of Jimmy Dale Greenwood was finishing his second year on a three-to-five bit, all of it served in a contract prison, courtesy of a judge who didn’t like half-breeds in general and smart-ass hillbilly singers like Jimmy Dale in particular.
The contract prison was a squat blockhouse nightmare that, except for the parallel rows of electric fences topped with coils of razor wire surrounding the buildings, resembled a sewage plant more than a penal facility. Most of the work done by the inmates was meant to be punitive and not rehabilitative in nature. In fact, both inmates and prison personnel referred to the work as “the hard road.” The hard road came complete with mounted gunbulls, leather-cuff ankle restraints, and orange jumpsuits that rubbed the skin like sandpaper in winter and became portable ovens in summer.
The majority of the personnel were not deliberately cruel. But drought and wildfires and the loss of family farms weren’t of their making, and shepherding prison inmates on a tar-patch crew beat delivering Domino’s pizzas or clerking at the adult-video store on the interstate. The line “It’s your misfortune and none of my own,” from the classic trail drover’s lament, seemed an accurate summation of the Texas contract gunbull’s attitude toward his charges.
Most of the inmates in the contract prison were recidivists and didn’t question their fate or the power structure under which they lived. That meant they didn’t grab-ass, eyeball, complain about the food, dog it on the job, wise off to Hispanic guys with Gothic-letter tats, or sass the hacks. If you committed the crime, you stacked the time. Then one day you popped out on the other end of your jolt and got a lot of gone between you and West Texas. It was that simple. Or should have been.
Jimmy Dale went down ostensibly for grand theft, the arrest being made after he crashed the stolen vehicle he was driving at ninety an hour through a police barricade. In reality, the judge dropped the jailhouse on Jimmy Dale’s head because of an unprosecutable knife beef that had taken place outside a saloon off Interstate 10. Jimmy Dale never denied he drove the shank hilt-deep into the victim’s chest. Nor did he deny boosting the car. What was he supposed to do? he explained to the highway patrol. Hang around and hope the victim’s friends in the Sheriff’s Department didn’t use him for a piñata? The problem for the DA was the fact that the victim pulled the shank, not Jimmy Dale. Another problem was that the victim was a pimp who believed he had the right to beat up his whores in the parking lot. Also, his claim that Jimmy Dale had butted into his business would probably not flush with a jury made up of First Assembly and Church of Christ members. Last, the stabbing victim was the judge’s nephew, and the judge had indicated to the DA that he didn’t see any need for feeding the liberal media’s appetite for scandal.
After two years on the hard road, with a shot at early parole because of overcrowding in the system, Jimmy Dale had the bad luck to fall under the supervision of one Troyce Nix, a six-feet-five-inch gunbull who once confessed to his peers, “Nothing gives me more pleasure than watching a full-grown man piss his pants.”
Nix had another inclination, one that for years he had satisfied with rental videos or on the Internet or across the border in Mexico. His inclination had cost him two marriages and his career as an MP in the United States Army. He saw nothing unusual about his behavior, much less perverse. In a coupling of any kind, he was always the male, never the female; hence, he was not a homosexual. Anyone who doubted that fact, particularly his sexual partner, was given a lesson about the true nature of physical dominance.
You set your parameters, you drew your lines. When people crossed your lines, you slapped them into shape. What was wrong with that? Troyce had worked at the Abu Ghraib prison, thirty-two klicks west of Baghdad. When one of his current colleagues asked him what it was like, Troyce replied, “At least none of the graduates come back for seconds.”
“No, after y’all got finished with them, they was probably busy blowing the shit out of American soldiers with IEDs,” one of the other hacks said.
The hack who made the remark was fired three weeks later.
Troyce’s body was covered with reddish-blond hair that seemed to glow like a nimbus in the sunlight. On the hard road, he wore a white straw hat coned up on the sides, shades, and needle-nosed cowboy boots that a trusty spit-shined every night. His olive-green trousers and shirt, with red piping on the pockets, were always starched and pressed, his black gunbelt polished. With his military posture, his shirt tucked tightly into his belt, he was a fine-looking man, his face serene, his voice neutral in tone. In some instances, he was almost fatherly toward the inmates under his supervision.
Jimmy Dale Greenwood was a different matter. Other than his conviction for grand auto, Jimmy Dale came into the prison population without a sheet. More simply stated, he wasn’t a criminal by nature and didn’t belong there. Also, it was impossible to read his expression or to know what he was thinking. He had a way of making enigmatic remarks that seemed to float on the edges of provocation and insult.
“I hear you left pecker tracks in a lot of white women’s beds,” one of the gunbulls said to him.
“I reckon it beats writing your name on the washroom wall, boss,” Jimmy Dale replied.
The gunbull was going to put Jimmy Dale on the barrel that night. But Troyce Nix intervened and, at the close of the workday, told Jimmy Dale to climb up in the truck cab and ride back to the prison compound with him.
“I stink pretty bad, Cap’n,” Jimmy Dale said.
Troyce grinned at him from behind his shades, the gearstick knob throbbing in his palm. “You’ll stink a whole lot worse if you spend the night standing on the barrel and dribbling in your pants,” he said.
Troyce was silent as they drove toward the compound, the dust from the alkali flats drifting through the windows. Up ahead, another truck towed the trailer that contained the gunbulls’ horses. Jimmy Dale could see the horses’ rumps swaying back and forth with the motion of the trailer, desiccated pieces of manure blowing into the wind. Troyce pulled a cigarette from his pack with his mouth and lit it with the lighter from the dashboard. The smoke leaked from his mouth like damp cotton.
“If you was wanting to buy a used horse trailer, what would you look for first?” Troyce asked.
“The floor,” Jimmy Dale replied.
“Why’s that?”
“’Cause if it’s got dry rot in it, your horse’s foot can punch through it on the highway.”
“If you was to build a floor on a trailer, how would you go about it?”
“I’d use only treated two-by-four planks. I’d use only bolts and screws instead of nails so there wouldn’t be cracks to soak up moisture. I’d put the planks in snug but with enough space between them so they could drain and aerate.”
“I’m a rodeo bum, boss.”
“Thought you was a country-and-western singer.”
“I guess shitkicking can cover lots of categories.”
Troyce laughed, appraising Jimmy Dale through his shades. “I want you to put a new floor in that trailer for me. Do a good job, and I’ll write you up for half trusty and give you an indoor job. In three months you’ll be up for full trusty.”
“I’ll be up for parole before then.”
Troyce swerved the truck around a jackrabbit that had bolted across the road. Or at least appeared to swerve around it. When he glanced into the side mirror, his face seemed to contain more than idle curiosity. “I wouldn’t necessarily count on that,” he said.
“I’ll build you a good floor, boss. I appreciate anything you can do for me,” Jimmy Dale said.
“Yeah, you’re gonna do just fine. Have a smoke.” Troyce shook a cigarette loose from the pack, offering the firm white cylinder to Jimmy Dale, holding his eyes when Jimmy Dale took it.
Just before they entered the compound, the truck bounced over a series of potholes. Troyce’s hand slipped off the gearshift, and the pads of his fingers brushed softly across Jimmy Dale’s thigh. For Jimmy Dale, the sensation was like the tiny feet of a small animal tickling across his skin, and it caused his penis to shrivel in his skivvies.
THE CONTRACT PRISON was run military-style. At 7:58 P.M. sharp, the count man shouted, “In the house!” At eight P.M. he shouted, “Locking it down!” Then the steel doors slid collectively into place, clanging shut in unison with a sound that reverberated through the building. The count man and the screw behind him began their walk down the bullrun, the count man whanging his baton on the bars as he passed each cell, the screw ticking check marks on his clipboard.
Jimmy Dale hated this part of the day, trapped between daylight and darkness, between motion and inertia, between the illusion that he worked under the same sky and breathed the same air as other human beings and the knowledge that he was little more than a state-owned cipher entombed in a five-by-eight-foot steel box.