Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

y need to. Otherwise, they live their lives just like the rest of us.”

Through the window, I could see a second column of smoke rising from the timber across the lake, a helicopter with a giant water bucket slung under its airframe trying to extinguish the fire before it spread. I walked out of the café into the lengthening shadows in the parking lot, into the cooling of the day, the trout dimpling the surface of the lake like raindrops. For reasons I couldn’t quite explain to myself, I remembered a Jewish lady I had once known. She had survived Bergen-Belsen, although her parents and siblings had died there. When asked by a friend of mine whether she still believed in God, she replied that she did. When my friend asked her where God was when her family died, she replied, “Looking down from above, wondering at what His children had done.”

CHAPTER 17

ONCE, IN SEATTLE’S Pioneer Square, Candace Sweeney had passed by a blind preacher ranting at a bunch of drunks by the homeless mission. The preacher’s eyes had no pupils and were the color of peeled hard-boiled eggs that have turned blue inside a refrigerator. His voice and words were cacophonous, threaded with rage at either his audience or his own misspent life. In the middle of his incoherence, he said something Candace never forgot: “Hell is a black box that’s got locks all over it. Kick the door and you’ll hear them rattle, but it won’t do you no good. You don’t die to get to hell. You’re already there.”

She had come to wonder if the preacher had been talking about Troyce.

During the night, she could feel his great weight turning on the mattress and hear his breath coming hard in his chest, as though he were inside a capsule that was sucking the oxygen from his lungs. He wore only his skivvies, and when she touched his bare skin, she could feel it twitch under her fingers. She stroked his hair, and for just a moment he was quiet. Then he cried out and his head jerked up from the pillow, his eyes wide, his face limned by the pink glow from the neon sign outside the motel.

“What is it, baby?” she asked.

“Nothing. A dream,” he replied.

He sat on the side of the bed, his shoulders rounded, looking into the shadows, listening for sounds that were not there. When she placed her palm on his back, his muscles were as hard as iron.

“You called out somebody’s name. You said, ‘Don’t do that.’ Then you said the name.”

Troyce turned around. His eyes were a washed-out blue, and in the semidarkness, they looked as though they had been snipped out of paper and glued on his face. “I did?”

“Other nights you’ve said this same name. Is this somebody you knew in Iraq?”

He shook his head, cupping his big hands on his knees, rocking on his buttocks.

“What’d you do, Troyce? What bothers you?”

“This wasn’t in Abu Ghraib. But we done things at this other place that got out of control, just like at the prison outside Baghdad. Some contract intelligence personnel wanted this one guy prepped. That’s what they called it. Like softened up, before they interrogated him. The guy was a hard case. We called him Cujo ’cause he had jaws like a big dog. He’d been tortured in Egypt and showed off his scars like they was badges of honor. He told us we couldn’t hurt him ’cause he wasn’t like us, that he didn’t eat God in a Communion wafer, that he lived inside Allah just like those Bedouins live inside the desert. He said Allah was as big as the desert, and once you were in Allah’s belly, you became part of him and nobody could touch you, not even death. He told all this to guys who was going to cuff him to a bed frame and wrap a wet towel around his face and keep pouring water into his nose and mouth till he near drowned.”

Candace had propped herself on her knees behind Troyce, one hand resting on his shoulder. His skin was as cold as stone. She could see both her reflection and Troyce’s in the wall mirror, and she tried to keep her face empty of the sick feeling his words were creating inside her.

“I told him, ‘Don’t do it, Cujo. Don’t try to be stand-up. Give these assholes what they want.’ I liked Cujo, but maybe not in a good way, get my meaning?” Troyce said. He turned and looked into her face to see if she understood. There was a dry click in his throat when he swallowed. “When Cujo told them to go fuck themselves, he said ‘Go fouk yourself,’ that’s the way he said it, I felt myself getting madder and madder at him, like he was better than me, like he was braver, like no matter what they done to him, he would always be the same man and I wasn’t as good as him, I was small somehow. And I thought about what my uncle and his friends done to me when I was a boy and how maybe I let it happen, how maybe I could have stopped it if I’d fought back, maybe it was my fault after all and I’d brought it on myself somehow, and I hated Cujo for being better than me and for the way maybe secretly I had feelings for him an American man don’t have for an Arab terrorist.”

Troyce stopped, his hands still cupped on his knees, his eyes staring down at his feet. Candace could feel a warm slick of perspiration forming between her palm and the smooth contour of Troyce’s shoulder. “What did you do, Troyce?” she said, almost in a whisper.

“I joined in with the intel guys. For just a second the towel slipped, and Cujo looked straight into my face with one eye. He couldn’t talk ’cause he was strangling, but he was looking at me, not at nobody else. He didn’t care about the contract intel guys. I was the Judas. I saw it in his eye. He died right then. He made sure I knew that he knew, and he died.”

Candace took a deep, almost ragged breath and rested her forehead on top of Troyce’s head, her knees tucked against his buttocks. He continued to look straight ahead, unsure what his revelation had done to Candace’s perception of him.

“That’s behind you now, honey,” she said. “You’re sorry for what you did. That’s all a person can do sometimes, just say he’s sorry. I think people can forgive us from the grave. We’ve just got to ask them. Cujo knows you’re sorry, doesn’t he? Why don’t you give him credit?”

“One of those contract intel guys had three cases of hot beer in his truck. We drove out in the desert and drank it. We smoked some dope and got drunk. These guys was talking about trout fishing in South Dakota. I kept pretending I was listening, but I knowed even then I wasn’t ever gonna be the same.”

She rearranged herself and sat next to him on the side of the bed. “Give it up, baby.”

“Words don’t bring back dead people. When people are in the grave, their mouths and their ears are full of dirt. They don’t talk and they don’t hear. I had a dream, that’s all it was. I shouldn’t have told you about it.”

She got up from the mattress and worked her nightshirt off her shoulders and head, then spread herself across his thighs, something she had never done before. “You tell me to stop and I will,” she said.

She held his head between her breasts, then picked up his phallus and placed it inside her. She felt her own eyes close and a quickening in her heart and a surge in her loins, then his hands were on her back and he was rising from the bed so he could lay her down on the mattress while he remained on top of her.

She became lost in the smell of his skin and hair, in the hardness of his sex deep inside her, in the laboring of his hips between her thighs, and she wondered if indeed she and Troyce were still lying in the pink glow of the motel neon, in a bed that thudded against the wall, or if the ferocity of his need had transported both of them to a desert where his jaws had become coated with grit and carrion birds made cawing sounds above their heads.

I GOT UP early Wednesday morning and made ham-and-onion sandwiches and packed cold drinks in an ice chest for Clete and me, then put my creel and fly vest and fly rod and hip waders in the back of my truck and knocked on his door before the sun had risen above the mountain. He said he was tied up and couldn’t fish with me, that he had to see Alicia Rosecrans that day, that he had to run down a lead on Quince Whitley, that he had to talk long-distance with his former employers, Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater, that Wee Willie and Nig’s clients were skipping their bail all over Orleans Parish and Clete n

eeded to do something about it.

“How about the pope? You need to chat him up today?” I said.