Swan Peak (8 page)

“You think we’re doing something illegal here, you working on my property?” Nix said.

“I thought about it.”

“You thought wrong. I’m a founding officer and stockholder in the corporation that owns this prison. That means my living quarters come with the package. Inmate maintenance here is just like inmate maintenance at the compound. If you was thinking about getting an ACLU lawyer—”

“I just want my good time back, boss.”

“You got a bad case of mono-brain,” Nix said.

He parked the truck by the windmill and told Jimmy Dale to get the posthole digger out of the toolshed. Then he went inside to use the bathroom. Just as the first raindrops struck the ground, Jimmy Dale heard the toilet flush. He twisted the posthole digger into the ground, busting through gravel and clay that had baked as hard as ceramic. He spread the wood handles to widen the hole. Then he cleaned the blades of the posthole digger in a bucket of water and started in again. The wind puffed the hackberry tree that shaded Nix’s house. The air was cool and rain-scented, and Jimmy Dale could hear the windmill’s blades ginning behind him. A bolt of lightning exploded on top of the cliff and startled him.

“When people is scared of lightning, it’s usually ’cause they grew up in a strict church,” Nix said. He was standing on the back porch, stripped to the waist, his yellow leather gloves pulled snugly on his hands. He had tucked his trousers inside his half-topped boots, as though he didn’t want to soil his trouser cuffs. He stepped off the porch onto the ground, the wind blowing his hair, his chest taut and dry-looking in the shadowy light, the limbs of the hackberry tree thrashing above his head. “You scared of lightning?”

“Not really. Fact is, I ain’t scared of a whole lot, boss.”

“Lay the posthole digger down.”

Jimmy Dale let it drop to the side, the handles clattering against the hardpan.

“I thought I was gonna go easy on you this time. But there’s something about you that really pisses me off. I just cain’t put my finger on it,” Nix said.

“People cain’t change what they are,” Jimmy Dale replied, unbuttoning his denim shirt with his left hand.

“It makes me want to lose all restraint and flat tear you apart. Can you relate to that?” Nix said.

“All I wanted was my good time back, boss.”

“Take off your britches. Or I can do it for you.”

“I don’t give a shit what you do, boss.”

Nix looked at him quizzically. Jimmy Dale was still facing the cliff, his face turned to the wind when he needed to speak. He slipped his hand down toward his belt buckle or perhaps his side pocket.

Nix stepped closer. He touched Jimmy Dale’s shoulder and slowly turned him around. “Say that again?”

The shank Hidalgo had made for Jimmy Dale had been fashioned from a triangular piece of automotive windshield glass, the blade three inches long, as pointed as a stiletto, as sharp on the edges as a barber’s razor, the butt end inserted in the sanded-down handle of a shoe-polish applicator, all of it wrapped in a scabbard made from newspaper and electrician’s tape.

“Sorry to hurt you like this, kid, but that’s just the way it is,” Nix said.

“You got it all wrong, boss,” Jimmy Dale replied.

He turned with the shank and slashed Nix backhanded across the jaw, opening the flesh to the bone. Then he hit him twice in the chest, each time going deep, aiming for the heart or the lungs. Nix reached out toward him, either trying to keep his balance or to ward off the next blow. But Jimmy Dale got under his arm and drove the blade into Nix’s chest again, going even deeper this time and snapping it off at the hilt, as Hidalgo had instructed him. Nix struck the ground heavily, his mouth puckered, his breath coming in short gasps, as though, somehow, through an act of will, he could control the massive hemorrhage taking place inside his chest.

Jimmy Dale went through the back door of the house and pulled a shirt and pair of work pants out of Nix’s bedroom closet, streaking the interior of the house with Nix’s blood. As he changed into Nix’s clothes, he looked through the back window and saw Nix rise from the ground and then collapse below the level of the window. A sound like kettle drums was thundering in Jimmy Dale’s head.

Moments later, he was roaring down the dirt road in the stake truck, hailstones bouncing off the windshield, his hands trembling on the wheel. He skidded in a cloud of dust onto the state road and headed due west, the front end shaking when he hit ninety, the engine needle on the dash climbing into the red. Nix’s stolen clothes felt like an obscene presence on his skin.

CHAPTER 5

FROM WHERE SHE
sat at the bar, Jamie Sue could see out the back window of the saloon onto Swan Lake. The lake was vast and steel-colored in the twilight, ringed with alpine mountains, the white cap of Swan Peak razored against the sky on the south end. Down the shore was a group of guest cottages among birch trees, and when the wind gusted off the water, the riffling leaves of the birches made Jamie Sue think of green lace.

A man and a woman Jamie Sue didn’t like were drinking next to her. They said they were from Malibu and driving to Spokane to catch a flight back to California. The woman’s hair hung to her shoulders and was dyed black, and she had a habit of touching it on the ends, as though it had just been clipped. She had an ascetic face and gray teeth and wore dark clothes and purple lipstick. She seemed to have no awareness of her surroundings or the fact that the subject of her conversation would be considered bizarre and distasteful by normal people.

“After about a year I got tired of working for Heidi,” she said. “Most nights I’d sit and watch while an eye surgeon freebased himself into the fourth dimension. I’d rather make five hundred a night having dinner and intellectual conversation, and maybe messing around later, than fifteen hundred watching a married guy freebase and pretend he’s head of FOX, know what I mean?”

Jamie Sue tried to focus on what the woman was saying, but she was on her third whiskey sour, and her attention kept wandering across the empty dance floor to a face she thought she had seen behind the bead curtain that gave onto the café attached to the saloon.

“So you’re in the entertainment business, too?” the man from Malibu said. He was deeply tanned, soft around the edges, his blond hair chemically sprayed so it dangled in wavy strands on his forehead. He wore black leather pants and a maroon shirt unbuttoned to his midsternum. His face was warm with alcohol, his elbow poised on the bar while he waited for Jamie Sue to answer his question.

“I used to sing professionally, but I don’t do that anymore,” she said.

“Is that really Bugsy Siegel and Virginia Hill in the picture?” the woman in purple lipstick asked the bartender.

The bartender glanced at the glass-framed color photograph mounted on the wall behind the bar. In it a couple were building a snowman on the edge of the lake. The woman in the photo wore a fluffy pink sweater and knee-high brown suede boots stitched with Christmas designs. Her hair was the color of a flamingo’s wing.

“My boss says they used to stay up in those cottages there,” the bartender said. He appeared to be a practical man who made a marginal living mixing cocktails in a rural area, and he was not interested in the visitors from California or their questions about gangsters from another era. His concern was with Jamie Sue Wellstone. She was probably one of the richest women in Montana, and she was now living year-round less than fifteen miles from the saloon. Jamie Sue Wellstone was watching the bead curtain at the entrance to the café. It was obvious to the bartender that she had seen someone or something that had disturbed her.

“You want another whiskey sour, Ms. Wellstone?” he asked.

“Yes, if you please, Harold.”

Harold bent to his task, lifting his eyes once toward the entrance to the café. He was a powerful man who wore crinkling white shirts and black trousers and combed the few strands of his black hair straight across his scalp. “Somebody out there get out of line, Ms. Wellstone?”

“I thought I recognized a man. But I was probably mistaken,” she replied.

“A guy who’s maybe part Indian?”

“Yes, how did you know?”

“I saw him looking at you. In fact, I saw him around here a couple of days ago. Want me to check him out?”

“No, don’t bother him. He did no harm.”

“You just tell me whatever you need, Ms. Wellstone,” the bartender said, wrapping a paper napkin around the bottom of her drink.

The man in black leather pants with the chemically sprayed hair had come in the saloon wearing a western straw hat, and had placed it crown-down on the bar. Stamped inside the rayon liner was the image of George Strait. The man noticed a greasy smear on the brim. He frowned at the bartender. “Give me some paper napkins,” he said.

Without looking up, the bartender put a stack of at least ten napkins on the bar.

“Give everybody a round, including yourself. You might get the fucking grease off the bar while you’re at it,” the man in leather pants said. He went into the restroom and shot the bolt behind him.

“You okay on your drinks?” Harold said to the women at the bar.

“I’m feeling just right, but thanks for asking,” the woman in purple lipstick said.

“When your friend comes back, maybe tell him this is Montana,” Harold said.

“What’s that mean?” the woman said.

“That this is Montana,” Harold replied.

“That’s your limo out front?” the woman in purple lipstick asked Jamie Sue.

“No, it’s my husband’s,” Jamie Sue said.

“Are you talking about Ridley Wellstone? He must own half of Texas.”

Jamie Sue’s chin rested on her palm. Through the window she could see a boy in a red canoe spin-casting along the bank, the water’s surface shimmering like pewter whenever the wind gusted. She could feel the rush of the whiskey sour taking hold in her nervous system, warming every corner of her heart, deadening memory, preempting expectations she knew would never be fulfilled. “I used to live in Texas, but I don’t anymore,” she said.

“I wasn’t probing, honey. I grew up in a shithole in the San Joaquin. The biggest event of the year was the Garlic Festival,” the woman said. “I would have screwed the whole Russian army to get out.”

She removed a piece of mucus from the corner of her eye, then opened her purse to get a cigarette. Three joints were tucked neatly in a silk side pocket. While she lit her cigarette with a tiny gold lighter, she watched an unshaved man in corduroy pants and a work shirt and lace-up boots enter the bar and try the handle on the men’s room door. When he discovered the door was locked, he shook the handle. A moment later, he returned and shook the handle harder, rattling the door against the bolt.

The unshaved man went to the bar and ordered a beer, drinking it from the bottle, scowling at the restroom door. Then he hit on the door with the flat of his fist. “You paying rent in there?” he said.

The man inside unlocked the bolt and pushed open the door with one foot. He was still cleaning his hat with the napkins the bartender had given him, the water running from the faucet. “I’ll be done in a minute,” he said.

The woman in purple lipstick watched the scene idly; then her gaze seemed to shift sideways and sharpen slightly. She took a drag off her cigarette, held the smoke in her lungs a long time, and released it slowly, blowing it at an upward angle. “That one isn’t bad-looking, if you don’t mind them a little gamey,” she said.

“That’s Quince, my driver,” Jamie Sue said.

“I’m talking about the Native American cutie-pie who was peeking at you from the café. You must grow them shy out here.”

The bead curtain was still rustling when Jamie Sue turned on the bar stool. She walked across the dance floor, her footsteps echoing inside the emptiness of the saloon, the row of video poker machines winking at her in the shadows. Inside the café, two workingmen were drinking coffee at the counter, and a family was eating at one of the booths. A log truck was pulling onto the state highway, a dark-skinned man in a soft gray hat riding in the passenger seat, his arm propped on the window.

“Who was that who just left?” Jamie Sue asked.

The waitress wiped the counter and looked out at the highway. “A guy hitching a ride,” she replied. She picked up a coin from the counter and dropped it in her apron pocket. “Not many drifters leave a four-bit tip.”

Jamie Sue returned to the bar and sat down. “What did the Indian man look like?” she asked the woman from Malibu.

“The kind who used to make my nipples pop,” the woman said, her eyes crinkling at the corners. “I traded up, but I still think about the guy who was my first. Seventeen and a gyrene. I think he’s the reason I see a sex therapist. You ever think back on those years? I’d like to go back and maybe do things different, stay married and that kind of crap, but Maury there in the can isn’t such a bad guy, I mean, it could be worse, right? Like, I could be one of the women in his films. Jesus Christ, if you think they’re bad on the screen, you ought to see what some of them do in their downtime.”

The restroom door opened again, and the man in black leather pants walked past Quince, blotting drops of water off his hat. “Ready to get out of here?” he said.

“It’s been nice, everybody. Oops, who just tilted the floor?” the woman in purple lipstick replied.

She and her companion started to leave just as a man in a Mercedes pulled into the parking lot and entered the saloon. The scar tissue that constituted his face, and the eyes that seemed to laugh inside the burned shell of his head, made the woman in purple lipstick involuntarily clench her companion’s arm. In fact, she seemed suddenly drunk, unprepared to deal with unpleasant realities that her rhetoric had kept at bay.

“My husband was a legionnaire. He was in a tank. In the French Sudan,” Jamie Sue said.

“What? What did you say?” the woman in purple lipstick said, unable to look away from the handicapped man.

“His tank burned. He was trapped inside it. That’s why he looks that way. Don’t stare at him. What’s the matter with you?” Jamie Sue said.