Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

He walked back toward his truck, then turned around, cleaning one ear with his little finger. He ticked a piece of matter off his fingernail. There was an indentation at the corner of his mouth, like a wrinkle in clay. “It’s Robicheaux, isn’t it?” he said.

“So?”

“Sally Dee purely hated you and Mr. Purcel. Used to talk about what he aimed to do to y’all. I saw him knock the glass eye out of a hooker because she mentioned your name. He was a mean little shit, wasn’t he?”

The sunlight was red across the valley as he and his friend drove back toward the state highway.

“Who are they, Dave?” Molly asked after they were gone.

“Trouble,” I said.

AFTER SUPPER, I talked with Albert about our visitors, the summer light still high in the sky, the valley blanketed with shadow, Albert’s gaited horses blowing in the grass down by the creek.

“They do security for a man name of Ridley Wellstone? From Texas?” he said.

“They seemed to know you,” I said.

Albert had fine cheekbones, intense eyes, and soft facial skin that belied the nature of his earlier life. His hair was white and grew over his collar, and he often wore an Australian digger’s hat that hung from the back of his neck on a leather cord. His profile always suggested Byronic images to me, a poet wandering in the wastes, kicking at stone fragments along the edges of a collapsing empire.

“They sound like worthless fellows to me. What was that other name you mentioned?” he said.

“Clete had a bad period in his life and got mixed up with some gamblers in Vegas and Tahoe. One of them was Sally Dio.”

“You talking about the Dio family out of Galveston?”

Oops.

“That’s the bunch,” I replied.

“They weren’t gamblers, they were pimps. They ran all the whorehouses. Clete worked for them?”

“For a while. They held his hand in a car door and slammed the door on it,” I said.

Albert set his boot on the bottom rail of the fence and

gazed out at the pasture. His wife had died of Parkinson’s three years past, and he had no children. His whole life now consisted of his ranch in the valley and another horse ranch he operated on the far side of the mountain. I wondered how a man of his extreme passions lived by himself. I wondered if sometimes his private thoughts almost drove him mad. “If those fellows come back around, send them up to the house,” he said.

Not a good idea, I thought.

“Are you hearing me, Dave?” he said.

“You got it, Albert,” I said.

“Look at the horses out there in the grass. You know a more beautiful place anywhere?” he said. “I don’t know what I’d do if a man tried to take this from me.”

I’M NOT SURE I believe in karma, but as one looks back over the aggregate of his experience, it seems hard to deny the patterns of intersection that seem to be at work in our lives, in the same way it would be foolish to say that the attraction of metal filings to a magnet’s surface is a result of coincidence.

On Saturday morning Molly and Albert drove into Missoula to buy groceries at the Costco on the edge of town. They stopped on the way home to pick up a new Circle Y saddle Albert had ordered from the tack shop in the back of the Cenex. While Albert paid for his saddle, Molly drank a can of soda inside the store and watched the customers gassing up their vehicles at the pumps or lining up at the fast-food drive-by window next door. The day was lovely, the sky blue, the Rattlesnake Mountains to the north glistening with lines of snow that had fallen during the night. It was what a Saturday in America should be like, she thought, a day when family people stocked up on groceries and spoke with goodwill to one another inside the freshness of the morning.

On a newspaper rack directly behind her, the front page of the Missoulian contained a headline story about the discovery of a coed’s body in a canyon one mile from the University of Montana campus. The girl’s high school yearbook picture stared placidly at the customers walking in and out of the store.

A white limousine with several people seated inside it pulled up beside a gas pump, and a man who must have been six feet four got out of the back and came inside the store with the help of aluminum forearm crutches. He wore a pearl-gray Stetson, shined needle-nosed boots, an open-collar plum-colored shirt, and a gray suit that had thin lavender stripes in it. But it was his gaunt face and the suppressed pain in it that caught Molly’s eye. It was obvious that walking inside and struggling with the heavy glass door was a challenge to him, and Molly wondered why no one from his vehicle had accompanied him. In fact, Molly had to force herself to look straight ahead so the man on crutches would not think she was staring at him. When he got in line at the counter to pay for a newspaper and a package of filter-tipped cigars, she could see the set of his jaw and the rigidity of his posture out of the corner of her eye. There was a controlled tension in his expression, the kind you witness in people who are experiencing unrelieved back pain, the kind that dwells at the base of the spine like a thumb pressed against the sciatic nerve.

One of the clerks tried to scan the man’s package of cigars, but her scanner came up empty. “Do you know how much these are?” she asked.

“No, I don’t,” the man replied.

“I’m sorry, I have to get a price check,” the clerk said.