Swan Peak (24 page)

“That’s Skeeter Davis’s song,” Gribble said.

“I knew a woman who could sing it just like Skeeter Davis.”

“No kidding?” Gribble said, lowering his beer bottle, his expression mildly curious.

“Anyone ever tell you that you got a voice like Lefty Frizzell?”

“Not really. Where’d you know this lady at?”

“I heard her sing in a beer joint in Texas once.”

Gribble looked straight ahead, his face empty, his beer bottle tilted forward in both hands, the heels of his boots hooked on the rungs of the bar stool. “There’s not many can sing like Skeeter could. What was this lady’s name?”

“Jamie Sue Wellstone.”

Gribble wiped his mouth with a napkin, hiding his expression.

The woman in the Harley T-shirt grew tired of being ignored by Clete and rejoined her friends at the table. Clete stared at the woman’s back, trying to remember why he had talked to her in the first place. He thought he could hear kettle drums beating in his head or tropical birds lifting from a jungle canopy, their wings flapping loudly against the sky.

“You ought not to keep looking at them men,” Gribble said.

“You ever sleep with another man’s wife?” Clete asked.

“Sir?”

“I hadn’t ever done that, at least not knowingly. Ever sleep with the wife of a man who was burned up in a tank?”

“Mr. Purcel, I ain’t up to this.”

“Were you in the service?”

“No sir.”

“See, when you watch other guys pay really hard dues, you accord them a certain kind of respect. That means you don’t screw their wives or even their girlfriends, particularly when it’s not an even field any longer. The guy who does that doesn’t deserve to wear the uniform. He doesn’t deserve to tell people he ever wore it, either.”

“You slept with this woman you was talking about?”

“What difference does it make? It’s yesterday’s box score, right?” Clete said. “What are those guys over there looking at?”

“Her name is Jamie Sue Stapleton. Her husband might call her Wellstone, but for a lot of us she’ll always be Jamie Sue Stapleton from Yoakum, Texas, ’cause that’s where she comes from. Don’t be talking about box scores, either, not when it comes to Jamie Sue.”

Clete refocused his eyes on Gribble, as though looking at a different man from the one he had picked up on the dirt road.

“Where you going?” Clete said.

“I feel sick. I took some cold medicine today. I’m gonna lie down in the back of the truck,” Gribble said. “I think I’m fixing to pass out.”

Gribble went out the door, his hand pressed to his stomach. Clete ordered another round, wondering if he was the only sane person on the planet.

In the next hour, Clete lost count of the amount of booze he pumped into his system. The noise inside the club had become deafening, and the band had compensated by turning up its loudspeakers. The hands on the clock above the bar either had no motion at all or in seconds indicated that twenty minutes had passed. Clete was sweating inside his clothes, his ears filling with sounds like wind blowing across moonscape. For just a moment all sound stopped, as though the shapes and movements of people around him were one-dimensional and no more real than those of a silent cartoon on a screen.

A second later, the sound track returned with the power of someone clapping his hands on Clete’s ears.

“Hey, Mac?” the bartender said.

“What?”

“You were in the Crotch?”

“Who told you I was in the Corps?”

“You asked me if I’d been at Parris Island.” The bartender leaned closer. “Keep your eyes on me. Don’t turn around. You hearing me, gunny?”

“Yeah,” Clete said.

“Those guys at the back table must know you from some other gig.”

“Yeah, they come into that joint on Highway 12 and 93.”

“I heard them talking. Don’t get yourself hurt.”

“You telling me they want some shit?”

“No, I didn’t say that at all.”

“Give me another shot and a beer back.”

“I tried.”

“Semper Fi,” Clete said, finishing the whiskey in his shot glass, sweat glistening on the tips of his hair.

He went into the restroom and came back out, looking directly at the bikers and the woman in the Harley T-shirt. They appeared to have lost interest in him. When he returned to the bar, a college boy and his girlfriend were standing on either side of his stool, trying to catch the bartender’s attention. “Sorry, we didn’t know you were sitting here,” the boy said.

“Forget it. You guys have one on me. I think I fried my mush,” Clete said, and put a five-dollar bill on the bar.

He walked outside, slightly off balance, the wind suddenly cool and fresh in his face, the stars arching across a black sky. He didn’t bother to see if Gribble was still in the camper’s shell; he didn’t care if Gribble was there or not. He opened the driver’s door to Albert’s truck, pulling the keys out of his pocket, and bent over to get in. That was when he saw a shadow break across the corner of his vision.

The blow was as hard as a blow can be before a person loses consciousness. The weapon itself seemed to come out of the sky, whistling as it whipped across the back of Clete’s skull. Inside a secluded place where Clete often lived, he knew he had been hit with a blackjack, one that had been manufactured in the classic design of a lead weight sewn inside an elongated sheath, mounted on a spring, balanced perfectly on a leather-woven grip that allowed the assailant to deliver a crushing, even fatal, blow with little effort.

Clete crashed across the seat and fell into a heap on the opposite side of the cab. With his blood running from his scalp into his collar, he felt himself being driven to a place and a final act that he had avoided for years — in Irish Channel street rumbles and on night trails strung with toe-poppers and booby-trapped 105 duds and in firefights with the death squads in El Salvador and up against the Mob in Reno and during Katrina when the levees collapsed and he had watched his first and only love, the Great Whore of Babylon, drown under the waves.

CHAPTER 13

FOR AN INDETERMINATE
period Clete lay in the bottom of a dark well that was filled with memories and sensations that he thought he’d forgotten long ago. He saw himself stripping away a brick wall in an old house on Tchoupitoulas, where a corpse dancing with maggots had been entombed. He saw himself prying open the trunk of a car inside which a mobster had been locked before it was driven into Lake Pontchartrain. He felt his weight bounce tight inside a parachute harness when he was in Force Recon, the breath whooshing from his chest, his steel pot razoring down on his nose.

He wanted to get out of the dark well, away from memories that somehow were associated with confinement and suffocation and bondage. Where was he? Why wouldn’t light enter his eyes when he opened them? All he could remember was the blow against the back of his head and tumbling into a great blackness that seemed to have no bottom.

When Clete actually awoke, to the degree that he knew he was still alive, he realized his eyes were wrapped with tape, his wrists locked behind a tree trunk with ligatures. He could smell pine needles on the forest floor and hear the wind blowing through the canopy. Above him, perhaps up a slope, he heard a heavy machine clanking and grinding over rocks and rough ground, then a sound like a steel bucket thudding into the earth, scraping up dirt and small boulders, unloading it all in a rasping downpour from a steel bucket.

The ground was hard under Clete’s buttocks, the bark of the tree cutting into his back. He pulled against the ligatures, then tried to get to his feet, but the circumference of the trunk was such that he couldn’t negotiate enough space to push himself into an upright position. His immobility was like that of a man prematurely sealed inside a coffin.

He scraped the tape back and forth against the tree bark, hoping to pull it loose from his eyes. But his abductor had wrapped it several times around Clete’s head, winding it tightly into the scalp and hair and the bloody wound where Clete had been hit with the blackjack. Then it had been wound around the eye sockets and eyebrows, molding the layers so that they probably could not be removed except with scissors or a knife. Clete pushed his heels into the dirt and tried to bend the tree backward against its root system, but to no avail. Up above, the earth-grader or bulldozer or whatever it was continued to grind and clank and dump large loads of dirt in a pile, the stench of burnt diesel drifting off its smokestack.

Why was somebody excavating on the hillside? What was he digging?

A grave
, Clete thought.
Or a place to bury someone alive
. He could feel sweat breaking on his forehead. “Who the hell are you?” he said.

But his words were lost in the engine’s roar and the scrape of steel against dirt and rock. He tried to think. Was it the bikers from the club? Were they twisted on meth? Would they take a barroom beef this far?

It was possible. They nailed women’s hands to trees. If he could work one wrist loose. If he only had a weapon. His twenty-five auto, his switchblade, even a can of Mace. Why had he messed with those guys?

But he knew the answer. Clete had spent a lifetime wading across the wrong Rubicon, provoking the skells and meltdowns, defying authority, ridiculing convention and normalcy. Women loved him for his vulnerability, and each one of them thought she was the cure for the great hole inside him that he tried to fill with food and booze and the adrenaline high that he got from dismantling his own life. But one by one they had all abandoned him, just as his father had, and Clete had immediately gone back on the dirty boogie, once more postponing the day he would round a corner and enter a street where all the windows were painted over and there was no sign of a living person.

The operator of the heavy machine cut the engine. In the silence, Clete heard someone drop to the ground and walk toward him. The footsteps stopped, and Clete realized his abductor was standing above him, perhaps savoring the moment, perhaps positioning himself to inflict injury that Clete could not anticipate or protect himself from.

“Whatever you’re going to do, just do it,” Clete said. “But you’d better punch my whole ticket, because I’m going to hunt you down and—”

Before Clete could complete his sentence, the abductor crouched next to him and made a shushing noise, as though speaking to a troubled child. Clete turned toward the abductor, his scalp drawing tight, waiting for the blow or the instrument of torment to violate his body. He jerked at the ligatures on his wrists. “You motherfucker,” he said.

He heard the abductor click open the top of a cigarette lighter and rotate the emery wheel with his thumb. The abductor lit a cigarette and drew in on it, the paper crisping audibly as the ash grew hotter. Clete felt the exhaled smoke separate across his nose and mouth.

“Fuck you,” Clete said, his big heart thumping in his chest.

The abductor made no response and continued to blow his cigarette smoke on Clete’s cheek and neck.

“Dave Robicheaux leaves hair on the walls, bub. Ole Streak is a mean motor scooter. You don’t put the glide on the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide,” Clete said, the words starting to break nonsensically from his mouth. “Streak dumped a guy’s whole brainpan in a toilet once. That’s no jive, Jack. Think of me when you eat a forty-five hollow-point.”

The abductor got to his feet, dropped his cigarette into the pine needles, and ground it under the sole of his shoe.

“Who are you? Tell me who you are and why you’re doing this,” Clete said.

Instead of a reply, Clete heard liquid sloshing inside a container and the
pop
of a plug being pulled from an airtight spout on the container. A second later, gasoline rained down on his head, soaking his hair, burning the wound inside the tape around his eyes, drenching his shirt and skin, pooling in his lap. The abductor even pulled off Clete’s shoes and soaked his feet and socks and drew the line of delivery up and down his legs.

“You sonofabitch, you cowardly piece of shit,” Clete said, his voice cracking for the first time.

The abductor began to pile twigs and decayed tree branches and pinecones and handfuls of pine needles on Clete’s head and torso and legs, whistling a tune, journeying back into the underbrush to gather more fuel for his enterprise. Clete struggled again against the ligatures, then tried to stretch his body forward so he could work one foot under a haunch and raise himself erect. All his efforts were futile, and he felt a sense of remorse and irrevocable loss he had not experienced since his fifteenth birthday, when he had torn the hands off a windup clock his father had given him.

He couldn’t stop the tapes that kept playing themselves over and over in his head. The Big Exit should have come from a Bouncing Betty or at the hands of diminutive figures in black pajamas and conical straw hats threading their way through elephant grass that reminded him of Kansas wheat. But blood expander and a heroic navy corpsman who had dragged Clete down a hillside on a poncho liner had cheated Sir Charles out of another kill, and Clete had returned to the Big Sleazy and a battlefield of another kind.

The Mob had tried to kill him, and so had members of the NOPD. Whores had rolled him, and a sniper had put two twenty-two rounds in his back while he carried his patrol partner down a fire escape. He had skipped the country on a homicide beef and joined the leftists in El Sal, where he got to see up close and personal the handiwork of M16 rifles and death squads in Stone Age villages. But the real enemy always lived in his own chest, and like the gambler who hangs at the end of the craps table, bouncing the dice down the felt again and again, watching everything he owns raked away by the croupier’s stick, Clete had finally wended his way to a dark hillside in western Montana where he now lay powerless and defeated, waiting for a degenerate to roll the emery whe-el on a cigarette lighter and turn his body into a funeral pyre.

How do you shut down a tape like that? How do you explain to yourself the casual manner in which you threw your life away?