Swan Peak (Dave Robicheaux 17)

“I can’t take another lecture,” he said.

“I’ll give you the keys. You don’t like how things are going, you can drive back to town and leave me on the stream.”

He gave me a long look, the kind he rarely gave anyone, one that indicated surrender to stubbornness that was worse than his own. We drove through Missoula to Bonner, then headed up the Blackfoot River to a spot an army friend had introduced me to when he and I were just back from Vietnam. It was one of those places that call to mind Hemingway’s statement that the world is a fine place and well worth the fighting for. Clete and I parked on a pebbly strip of sand at the entrance to a box canyon threaded by the river. The morning was still cool, but the sun was shining on the flooded grass and exposed rocks in the shallows, and flies were hatching in the sunlight and drifting out onto a long green riffle that undulated over boulders that were as big as cars.

I promised to myself that I would keep my word and not lecture Clete, nor give him any more grief or worry than he already had to bear. We fished upstream with dry flies, working our way around a bend with high canyon walls and woods on either side of us, staying fifty yards apart so one of us would not ruin the fishing for the other. The German browns would not spawn until fall, but the rainbow and the cutthroat were hitting on a Renegade fly, whose wings float high up on the riffle and imitate the configuration and appearance of several different insects. It was grand to be on this particular stretch of the Blackfoot, not unlike entering a Renaissance cathedral. The canyon was full of wind and filtered light, and magical transformations seemed to take place constantly in the water that hummed around our thighs. It was the type of moment you do not want to give up, because you know intuitively that it is irreplaceable and even sacred in ways you don’t try to describe to others.

But I believed Clete was on a collision track with a train, and as his friend, I had to say something to him, if only to share information I possessed and he did not.

Just before noon, when the sun was high above the canyon, we got out of the riffle and unsnapped our waders and sat on a cottonwood log that was sculpted as white and smooth as bone by years of spring runoff. We ate the ham-and-onion sandwiches I had made, and drank the soda I had packed in ice, and listened to the rocks creak under the heavy pull of the current.

“I went up to Swan Lake yesterday and talked with Jamie Sue Wellstone,” I said.

He continued eating, watching an osprey sail above the cottonwoods. He seemed to take no note of my words.

“I believe she’s a lot better person than I gave her credit for,” I said.

“Glad to hear you say that, big mon.”

“I learned some other things, too. The guy who calls himself J. D. Gribble is probably her boyfriend and the father of her child. Gribble is likely also a fugitive.”

This time I got his attention. “Wait a minute,” he said, shaking one hand in the air as though warding off flies. “The ranch hand is her ex-lover?”

“I don’t know if ‘ex’ is the right prefix.”

“The night I got sapped, when Gribble and I were drinking, I told him I got it on with Jamie Sue.”

“That’s not your fault. I mean, you didn’t know Gribble was her boyfriend.”

“I slept with one woman and cuckolded two guys. How can one guy manage that?”

“Maybe that’s what both those guys deserved.”

I couldn’t believe what I had just said. Once again, I had slipped into my old role as Clete’s enabler. He put down his sandwich on a square of waxed paper on top of the log and screwed an index finger into each temple. “What are you trying to do to my head?”

“Listen to me, Cletus. This gunbull, Troyce Nix, was at Albert’s looking for a guy who probably cut some holes in him. Albert isn’t saying, but I think the guy is Gribble.”

“What has this got to do with the guy who tried to light me up?”

“I don’t know. But you’re involved with Alicia Rosecrans now. Think about what that means.”

Clete Purcel was a man of large physical appetites and a propensity for violence and mayhem when the situation required it. He also had a propensity for violence and mayhem when the situation did not require it. But he was also one of the most intelligent men I have ever known. It didn’t take long for the connections to come together in his eyes.

“The guy who saved me from getting burned to death may have a warrant on him, and I know this, but I’m not going to tell Alicia Rosecrans about it?”

“If you’re copacetic with that, no problem. If not—”

He folded the waxed paper around his sandwich and placed the sandwich in a paper trash sack I had brought along. He stared at the stream and the froth curling around a beaver dam where I had told him some large cutthroats were holed up. “I’d better head on back,” he said.

“Let’s fish the dam, Clete. There’ll be another hatch soon. I got a two-pounder out of there once.”

“Another day,” he said. He peeled off his hip waders one at a time and kicked them high in the air toward the truck, standing in his socks on the strip of pebbly beach, indifferent to the rocks cutting into his feet, his mouth hooked down at the corners, his green eyes clouded with a special kind of sadness.

QUINCE WHITLEY COULD not believe how badly he had messed up. No, that wasn’t correct. Quince could not believe how badly other people had messed him up. He had worshipped Jamie Sue Wellstone, had told her how everybody dug her music back in Mississippi, how he had listened to her songs on the jukebox and on the late-night country broadcast from Memphis, same station that had first broadcast Jerry Lee Lewis’s recordings at Sun Records, doing all this for a woman who had turned around and treated him like he was toe jam.

Then, while he’s fueling up at the convenience store, minding his own business, Miss White Trash of 2007 starts staring at him like somebody upwind just passed gas. He says, “Can I help you?” and she dimes him with her swinging-dick boyfriend, this guy pretending he’s a Texas lawman who then smashes Quince’s face on the toilet-bowl rim because he offers the guy an honest business deal.

What happens as a result? Nothing. People outside the crapper are buying picnic supplies while Quince’s bridge and a half-cup of his blood are sliding down the bowl. You hurt, fella? Of course not, I always walk around with wads of toilet paper shoved up my nostrils.