Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

Harold finished making the gimlet but didn’t place it on the bar. He picked up a bar rag and wiped his hands with it, clearly caught between his desire to please and his fear that he was about to pour gasoline on a flame.

She propped her elbows on the bar and pressed her fingertips against her temples. “I’m sorry, I’m not feeling well,” she said. “Please excuse my behavior.”

“Everybody has those kinds of days. This morning a guy was tailgating me. When we got to the red light, I walked back to his truck and—” Harold stopped, his attention riveted on the doorway that led into the café.

“What is it?” Jamie Sue said. Then she heard her little boy, Dale, screaming his head off.

Quince had just walked through the bead curtain, carrying Dale in his arms, the beads trailing off Dale’s head. “I’m sorry, Miss Jamie. I got up from the table to get him some ice cream and he fell out of the high chair.”

She got off the bar stool, the blood draining from her head into her stomach. She lifted Dale from Quince’s arms and held him against her breast. He had stopped crying, but he was hiccuping uncontrollably, and his cheeks were slick with tears. Quince got a chair for her, and they sat down at one of the tables by the small dance floor. “Miss Jamie, I don’t talk out of school, but I know what’s going on. It’s that guy from New Orleans, Clete Purcel, isn’t it? He’s been nothing but trouble since we caught him trespassing on the ranch. He put Lyle in the hospital and went out of his way to cause disruption in y’all’s home life. I’m not a blind man. I got my feelings. Excuse me for being direct.”

She had her hands full with Dale, and she couldn’t concentrate on what Quince was saying. The saloon was empty except for her and her little boy and Quince and the bartender, and every sound seemed to resonate off the polished wood surfaces and echo against the ceiling.

“Lyle just got out of the hospital last night. The cops aren’t gonna do anything about it, either. I heard your brother-in-law talking to the sheriff. The sheriff must have said something about ‘fair fight,’ because Mr. Wellstone really got mad and said, ‘Why don’t you people grow up? This isn’t a Wild West movie.’”

“Did he hit his head?” Jamie Sue asked.

“Who? You mean Dale? No ma’am. I mean I don’t know. He did a flip right over the eating board and crashed on the floor. His little face just bashed right into it. I bet it damn near rattled his brains loose. The waitress come running around the counter and spilled a tray all over a guy’s suit.”

Jamie Sue thought she was going to be sick. “Bring the car around,” she said.

“I was fixing to do that.”

“Then go do it.”

“Ma’am?”

“Shut up and go do it. But just shut up.”

When Quince got to his feet, his belt buckle and flat-plated stomach and starched work shirt were so close to her face, she could smell his odor. For just a moment she saw a look in his eyes that went way back into her early life in the South — the kind of feral anger you normally associate with abused animals that have been pushed into a corner with a stick. Except the form of resentment she saw in Quince’s face was far more dangerous than its manifestation in animals. It was hardwired into an entire class of poor-white southern males, like genetic clap they passed down from one generation to the next. They had perhaps the lowest self-esteem of any group of human beings in the Western Hemisphere and blamed Jews, Yankees, women, and black people for their problems, anyone besides themselves. They stoked their anger incrementally every morning of their lives; they fed on violence and exuded it through their pores. The mean-spirited glint in their eyes always seemed to be in search of a trigger — a word, a gesture, an allusion — that would allow them to vent their rage on an innocent individual. Blacks feared them. Their fellow whites avoided them. But no reasonable person deliberately incited them.

“Did you hear me, Quince? I’ve got more than I can handle right now,” Jamie Sue said. “Where’s my cell phone?”

“On the table.”

“Don’t just stand there. Go get it and bring it to me. Then get the car. You can bring the cell phone and bring the car around without my saying anything else, can’t you?”

“I’ll do just that. Yes ma’am, I’ll get cracking on that son of a bitch right now,” Quince said.

Moments later, Jamie Sue emerged from the saloon with Dale in her arms. His diaper was wet. Blinded by the brilliance of the sunshine, he looked about him as though seeing the world he lived in for the first time. Quince had backed up the Mercedes and was coming hard toward the entrance of the saloon, gravel pinging under the fenders. Jamie Sue held Dale tightly against her chest and turned her back, shielding her son from the dust Quince had scoured out of the parking lot. She could feel Dale’s little heart beating against her own, his frightened mouth wet on her cheek.

As the dust drifted in an acrid-smelling cloud over both of them, she knew why the gangster’s girlfriend in the photograph had come to Swan Lake in the wintertime. It was because of the cold. The cold numbed all feeling. It drove other people from the cottages and the saloon and the café and the highways. It sculpted the birch trees into bone and flanged the lake with ice and made the countryside white and sterile and pure. It left the girl in the photo free, because now she had nothing else to lose, and there were no comparisons in her ken to remind her of how much she had lost.

CHAPTER 11

I WENT EARLY FRIDAY morning with Clete to the health club on the Bitterroot highway, south of Missoula, and watched him work out on the heavy bag. He wore a purple-and-gold Mike the Tiger sweatshirt, the sleeves sawed off at the armpits, and a pair of shiny red rayon boxing trunks that hung to his knees. He was smacking the gloves hard into the bag, up on the balls of his feet, his weight forward, throwing his shoulders into it, vibrating the bag on its chain, whap, whap, whap. I could smell beer in his sweat.

I stood up from the chair I was sitting on and steadied the bag. I could feel the power of his blows thudding through the bag’s thickness into my hands. He reminded me in his style of Two-Ton Tony Galento. He swung his left and his right with equal murderous effect, full-out, in sweeping roundhouse hooks, his face deadpan, his brow furrowed. And like Galento in either the ring or a broken-glass back-alley brawl, Clete was as indifferent to his own pain as a bull is when it advances toward a matador.

He had been in a funk for days, and I didn’t know what it would take to get him out of

it. He said his liver ached, and his blood pressure was probably through the roof. I thought if I stayed with him, got him into the steam room and a shower and a change of clothes, he could start the day fresh and clean and free of the boilermakers that daily fouled his blood. We could drive downtown to a workingman’s café and enjoy a breakfast of steak and eggs and spuds, like we used to do when the two of us walked a beat in the French Quarter. It would be a modest start, but at least it would be a start. As the writer Jim Harrison once said, we love the earth but we don’t get to stay. So why not have a decent sunrise or two while we’re hanging around?

But I knew my chances were remote. I also knew the thoughts that were going on behind that furrowed brow. “That Wellstone woman isn’t worth it, Cletus.”

“Who said she was? What does it take to get you off my case, Streak?”

How do you tell your best friend that his problem is not the women in his life but himself? Maybe it had not been Jamie Sue Wellstone’s intention, but she had driven the barb deep, twisted it, and broken it off inside Clete’s elephantine hulk. In fact, she had done what is perhaps the worst thing one human being can do to another. She had made Clete feel that he had been used and used badly, led into a tryst and discarded like yesterday’s bubble gum. Even worse, she had left him with uncertainty about her motivation. She had fixed it so he couldn’t simply close the door on what had happened and mark off the whole episode as bad judgment, the kind of mistake that men over forty line up to commit again and again. Instead, he would repeatedly sort through each sordid detail with tweezers, wondering if he was being too severe in his judgment of her or if he wasn’t simply an over-the-hill fool.