Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

DURING THE WEEK we heard a lot more about Ridley Wellstone and his family, in the same way you hear a word or name for the first time and then hear it every hour for the next month.

The Wellstones had arrived in Montana with checkbook in hand, not unlike the Hollywood celebrities and Silicon Valley millionaires who had come in the 1990s, believing that the beauty of the state was simply one more gift that a just and wise capitalistic deity had bestowed upon them for their personal use.

I must make a confession here. After telling Clete to ignore the destruction of his fishing gear by the Wellstone security personnel, and after telling Albert to forget the past and write off Ridley Wellstone’s arrogance, I had made calls to friends in the oil business in both Lafayette and Dallas. The information I gathered about the Wellstones may seem from another era. It isn’t. To a southerner, the story of the Wellstone family is a familiar one. The coarseness and privation of their background, the occasional ruthlessness of their methods, and the exploitation of their fellow man are rites of passage that are forgotten within a generation, if not sooner. The battle-fatigued knight returning to his castle, dragging his bloodied sword across stone, does not have to give an accounting for his deeds. Why dwell on the sight of burning huts in a peasant village when you can thrill to the horns blowing along the road to Roncevaux?

Ridley and his brother, Leslie, were the children of a Texas wildcatter by the name of Oliver Wellstone who, at age ten, had carried water by the bucket to drilling crews in the original Spindletop Field outside Beaumont. At age twenty-three, during the Depression, he borrowed one hundred dollars from a Bible salesman and talked a black farmer into accepting a promissory note for the lease on a two-acre cypress bog. The rig was constructed of salvaged railroad ties; the drill was powered by a twelve-cylinder motor removed from a junked Packard automobile. Three weeks after drilling commenced, the bit punched into a geological dome that sprayed salt water and a stench like rotten eggs high above the swamp. When the air cleared, Oliver Wellstone was convinced his dreams of wealth had come to naught. Then the ground under his feet rumbled and shook, and a geyser of sweet black crude exploded out of the wellhead and showered down on his head like a gift from a divine hand. He peered up at the heavens, his mouth open, his arms extended, his face running with oil. If there was such a thing as secular baptism, Oliver Wellstone had just experienced it.

Ten years later, he owned six producing fields in Louisiana and Texas, three ranches, a string of canneries, and an Austin radio station.

He bought a home in Houston’s River Oaks, a metropolitan oasis of trees and high-banked green lawns and palatial estates where success was a given and the problems of the poor and the disenfranchised were the manufactured concerns of political leftists. Unfortunately for Oliver and his family, financial equality in River Oaks did not necessarily translate into social acceptance.

Wildcatters like H. L. Hunt and Glenn McCarthy and Bob Smith may have respected him, but his peckerwood accent and fifth-grade education trailed with him like cultural odium wherever he went. The fact that his wife’s face could make a train turn onto a dirt road didn’t help matters, either. At formal dinners Oliver stuffed his napkin inside his collar and sawed his steak like a man cutting up a rubber tire, then ate it with his fork in his left hand, dunking each bite in obscene amounts of ketchup. A columnist in the Houston Post said his head looked like a grinning alabaster bowling ball. He had a phobia about catching communicable diseases, washed his hands constantly, and on cold days wore two flannel shirts under his suit coat and refused to take off his hat indoors. Every day of his life he ate a Vienna-sausage-and-mayonnaise sandwich for lunch and walked eight blocks to his office rather than put money in a parking meter. At any café he frequented, he loaded up on free toothpicks at the cashier’s counter. When Oliver and his wife applied for membership in one of Houston’s most exclusive country

clubs, their application was denied.

That was when Oliver returned to his holy-roller roots, in the same way a man returns to a homely girlfriend whose arms are open and whose heart makes no judgments. Pentecostals speaking in tongues and writhing in the spirit or dipping their arms in boxes of snakes might seem bizarre to some, but tent crowds all across Texas recognized Oliver as one of their own. When Oliver gave witness, there was rapture and sweetness in their faces. No one there was overly concerned about stories of Oliver’s involvement with slant drilling or stolen seismograph reports or, in one instance, pouring lye in the eyes of a competitor. If he was challenged by a fellow believer about the contradiction between his philanthropy and the sources of his wealth, Oliver’s response was simple: “There is nothing the devil hates worse than seeing his own money used against him. Let the church roll on!”

But Oliver’s sons turned out to be nothing like him. What they were is much more difficult to describe than what they were not.

ONE WEEK HAD come and gone since Molly had backed Albert’s pickup into the Wellstone limo. Then another week passed, and I heard nothing more about either the accident or the murder of the two university students. Perhaps in part that was because I avoided watching the news, hoping I could slip back into the loveliness of the season, the mist in the trees at sunrise, the smell of horses and wood smoke on the wind, the summer light hanging in the sky until ten P.M.

Fond and foolish thoughts.

Saturday night a downpour drenched the valley and knocked trees over on power lines and washed streams of gravel down the hillsides. During the storm, for reasons I can’t explain, I dreamed of the Louisiana of my youth. I saw the slatted light that glowed at dawn through the shutters on my bedroom windows. I saw the pecan and oak trees in our yard, the fog off the bayou like cotton candy in the branches. I heard my mother gathering eggs for our breakfast in the barn, and I heard my father loading his crab traps and hoop nets in the back of his stake truck. I could smell the humus back in the swamp and the fecund odor of fish spawning and the night-blooming flowers my mother had planted in her garden. Not far from our home, vast expanses of green sugarcane were swirling in the wind, as though beaten by the downdraft of helicopter blades, backdropped by a sky that was piled with blue-black thunderheads.

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.