Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

“It was a bad beef. But everybody in there has got the same complaint. So I don’t talk about it.”

“Albert is a friend of mine,” I said.

He was sitting right across the plank table from me. He picked up his coffee cup and drank from it, his hand fitted around the entirety of the cup. “I already told Mr. Hollister I ain’t necessarily proud of certain periods in my life. I had the impression he accepted my word and didn’t hold a man’s past against him.”

“Is that your guitar?”

He rubbed the calluses on his palms together, his eyes empty. He stared out the window into the darkness as though he had found no good words to use. “There ain’t nobody else living here. So I guess that makes it mine.”

“It was just a question.”

“I’ve had a lifetime supply of questions like that. They always come from the same people.”

“Which people is that?” I asked.

“The ones who want authority and power over others. The kind that ain’t got no lives of their own. The kind that cain’t leave other folks alone.”

“That’s hard to argue with,” I said. “But here’s the problem, J.D. When a guy is still splitting matches, he hasn’t been out long. When a guy is on the drift from another state, he either went out max time or he jumped his parole. If he went out max time, he’s probably a hard case or a guy who was in for a violent crime. If he’s wanted on a parole violation, that’s another matter, one that’s not too cool, either.”

“I got news for you, mister. I ain’t a criminal. And I ain’t interested in nobody’s jailhouse wisdom, either.”

“Tell Albert I’m out in the truck. Thanks for the coffee,” I said.

“You got a problem with me working here, tell Mr. Hollister. I was looking for a job when I found this one,” he said.

There was a mean glint in his eye that probably did not serve his cause well. But I couldn’t fault him for it. It’s easy to come down on a man who doesn’t have two nickels in his pocket. Actually, I had to give J. D. Gribble credit. He hadn’t let me push him around. In truth, the crime of most men like him is that they were born in the wrong century. The Wellstones of the world are another matter. Maybe it was time to take a closer look at them and not scapegoat a drifter who was willing to risk his job in order to retain his dignity.

IT WAS STILL raining Friday evening when I drove to a revival on the Flathead Indian Reservation, up in the Jocko Valley, a few miles from Missoula. The light was yellow and oily under the big tent, the surrounding countryside a dark green from the rains, clouds of steam rising from the Jocko River and the unmowed fields, the Mission Mountains looming ancient and cold against a sky where the sun did not set but died inside the clouds.

I didn’t know what I’d expected to find. The congregants were both Indian and white working people, most of them poor and uneducated. Their form of religion, at least as I saw it in practice there, was of a kind that probably goes back to the earliest log churches in prerevolutionary America. South Louisiana is filled with it. In the last twenty-five years, it has spread like a quiet fire seeping through the grass in a forest full of birdsong. It offers power and magic for the disenfranchised. It also assures true believers that they will survive an apocalyptical holocaust. It assures anti-Semites that Israel will be destroyed and that the Jews who aren’t wiped off the planet will convert to Christianity. More simply, it offers succor and refuge to people who are both frightened by the world and angry at the unfair hand it has dealt them.

I sat on a folding chair at the back of the tent, a patina of wood chips under my shoes, ground fog now puffing out of the darkness. The minister wore a beard that was barbered into lines that ran to the corners of his mouth and around his chin. His navy blue suit looked tailored, snug on his hips and narrow shoulders; his silver vest glittered like a riverboat gambler’s. His enunciation was booming, the accent faintly southern without properly being such, the words sometimes unctuous and empathetic, sometimes barbed and accusatory, like the flick of a small whip on a sensitive part of the soul. The congregants hung on every word as though he were speaking to each of them individually.

There was no overt political message, but the allusions to abortion and homosexual marriage threaded their way in and out of his narration. A woman with pitted cheeks and black hair cut in bangs was sitting on the edge of her chair next to me. She wore jeans with cactus flowers sewn on the flared bottoms and a black-and-red cowboy shirt with white piping below the shoulders and around the pockets. Her chin was lifted as though she were trying to see over the heads of the people in front of her. I offered to change chairs with her.

“That’s all right, I was looking for my friend,” she said. “There he is. I thought he had run off on me.”

She smiled when she spoke, her eyes lingering on the opposite side of the tent, where a tall man wearing a nylon vest and a coned-up white straw hat and a pocket watch with a fob strung across his stomach was watching the crowd. I saw the tall man bend over and show what appeared to be a photograph to a couple of people sitting at the end of a row. A moment later, he showed the photograph to others. One of the ushers had taken notice of him and was staring intently at the tall man’s back. The usher happened to be Jamie Sue Wellstone’s driver, the man who seemed to have no other name than Quince.

Take a chance, I thought. “Is your friend a cop?” I asked the woman next to me.

“Why you want to know?” she said.

“He was showing a photograph to some people. That’s what cops do sometimes, don’t they?”

“Troyce looks like a cop. But he’s not. How long do these things last?”

“Depends on how broke the preacher is.”

She gave me a second look. Then she looked at me again. I could almost hear the wheels turning in her head. “You just happen to be passing by and decide to get out of the rain?”

“A guy has got to do something for kicks.”

“That line is from a movie.”

“Is that a fact?” I said.

“Yeah, Rebel Witho