CANDACE SWEENEY HAD never understood abstract concepts connected with death, geographical permanence, or what people called “planning for the future.” She associated those particular concerns with people who either lived in a different world from the one she knew about or who deluded themselves about the nature of reality. The kind of people who spent their time at garage sales, window-shopping at the mall, or watching the Business Channel. Like they were going to take any of that crap with them.
The future didn’t exist, right? So what was the point of trying to control what hasn’t happened? The same applied with relationships. People came and went in your life, just like people entered turnstiles and exited them on the other side. In and out, right? Why place your trust in anyone who was just passing through?
She didn’t remember her mother. Her father was nicknamed Smilin’ Jack. He claimed the mother had died of ovarian cancer up in British Columbia, where he had worked as a gypo logger and sometimes on commercial fishing boats. But others said Candace’s mother was a morphine addict and a prostitute who ran a brothel in Valdez. When Candace was thirteen, Smilin’ Jack left her with a cousin in Seattle and went into the Cascades to pan gold. He was never seen again. He didn’t abandon her. He wasn’t profligate or mean or selfish. He had simply walked off in the rain, just like he was entering a turnstile, and had been absorbed by the great green-gray mass of mountains east of Seattle.
Now it was early Thursday morning in a budget motel not far from the Blackfoot River, downwind from a sawmill that smelled like the Pacific Northwest where Candace had grown up. The lights were on in a truck stop across the road, and log trucks were parked outside the café area, their diesel engines hammering. The rain had quit, and Candace knew it was going to be a good day. Or did she just want it to be a good day? The latter thought was disturbing to Candace, because wanting or needing anything, particularly when it had to be granted by other human beings, was an invitation to dependency and trouble.
She had made a cup of instant coffee from the hot water in the bathroom tap, and she drank it in her pajamas by the window and watched Troyce sleep. She didn’t understand Troyce. He was not like any man she had ever known. He opened doors for her, waited for her to order first in a restaurant, and didn’t use profanity in her presence. He seemed to genuinely like being with her and gave her money for whatever she wanted to buy without her even asking. But their first night together in a motel, she had clicked off the television set with the remote and turned off the overhead bed lamp and pulled the blanket up to her chin, waiting in the darkness for his hand to touch her. When he fell fast asleep, his back to her, she attributed his behavior to the fatigue that the injuries in his chest caused him.
In the morning she had felt his hardness against her hip, his breath touching her cheek like a feather. Then he’d opened his eyes and smiled at her like a man who wasn’t quite sure where he was. He’d gone into the bathroom and brushed his teeth and shaved and combed his hair. When he came out, drying his neck with a towel, his cheeks ruddy, he was completely dressed. He asked her what she wanted for breakfast.
She did not question him about his past, less out of fear of what he was than fear that he would lie to her. If he lied to her, she would know that in reality he was like other men, that he did not respect her and his attitude toward her had been dishonest and manipulative from the beginning. Her realization that she had stepped over a line and had made herself vulnerable to a man she hardly knew – except that he reminded Candace of her father – filled her with trepidation and anxiety and a growing sense of distrust about herself.
She had taken care of herself since she was thirteen. She didn’t need any more lessons in the school of hard knocks.
But now she found herself residing in a canyon wet with dew, across from a truck stop whose neon signs smoked in the cold, wondering if all her experience on the ragged edges of America had adequately prepared her for the relationship she had entered with a six-feet-five man by the name of Troyce Nix.
He pushed himself up in bed, his face flinching with the pain his wounds caused him. He had never been specific about the origin of his injuries. He had said simply, “A fellow tried to do me in. He dadburned near pulled it off.” He never denied he had been a cop of some kind. By the same token, he didn’t indicate he had been one, either. From the way he talked, she believed he had been in the army, maybe even to Iraq, and had encountered some kind of trouble there, maybe even in an army stockade. He always read the articles about the war first when he opened the newspaper. But wherever he had been or whatever he had done, he was a man’s man, and other men knew it. When she was with him, other men didn’t let their eyes wander as they would have if she had been alone. He seemed to find no fault in her, never criticized, and always laughed at her jokes and her irreverence. He had become the man who had always lived on the edge of her dreams, one who had chased float gold in the Cascades, believing rocks washing down from snowmelt could make him and his daughter rich.
In short, she had fallen in love with a man who didn’t touch her under the sheets in the darkness. Ironically, he had become the elusive figure who had been absorbed on the other side of the turnstile.
She sat down on the mattress and picked up Troyce’s hand in hers. She made circles with her fingers on the round outlines of his knuckles and brushed back the hair on his forearm. “I feel like I’m not being the friend I should be,” she said.
“You’re real special. You just don’t know it,” he said.
“Somebody hurt you, Troyce. Last night you didn’t want to tell that fellow Mr. Robicheaux why you were looking for the man in the photo. I didn’t talk to him about you, but because you don’t tell me what’s going on, I could have opened my mouth and said the wrong thing.”
“Well, you didn’t, and that’s all that matters.”
“Don’t you like me?”
“Sure, I do. Any man would. You’re heck on wheels, little darlin’.”
“Is it something about the way I look? My tattoos or the pits in my face?”
He lifted his hand from hers and touched his fingers on her cheek and around her mouth and eyes and behind her ears. The top of her pajamas was unbuttoned, and she saw his eyes drift to the tattoos of flowers on her breasts. His fingers grazed her nipples, his lips parting slightly. “I’m cut up too bad inside,” he said. “That fellow broke the shank off in me. I like to bled to death.”
But she’d seen the lie in his eyes before he even spoke it.
“It’s all right. You’ve been good to me, Troyce. I’m not complaining,” she said.
“A woman like you is the kind every man wants. You’re loyal, and you’re not afraid. Background or schooling don’t have anything to do with what a man likes. You’ll give a man your whole person and stick with him to the graveyard. I know men better than you do. Believe me when I say that.”
She searched his eyes, her heart twisting inside her, a terrible truth suggesting itself right beyond the edge of his words.
“Don’t cry. I wouldn’t do anything to make you cry, little darlin’,” he said.
THAT SAME THURSDAY morning Molly and I drove into Missoula and had breakfast, then went to the courthouse, where I told Joe Bim Higgins of my conversation with the Indian girl who had been wearing a cross similar to the one Seymour Bell had probably worn around his neck the night he was murdered.
“The Indian gal is some kind of campus minister with this revival group?” he said.
“That’s what she says. But she didn’t seem to know Seymour Bell or Cindy Kershaw.”
“You think Bell was mixed up with Jamie Sue Wellstone somehow? Like a junior minister with her group?”
“Could be.”
“I think we have a random killer on our hands. I don’t particularly care for rich outside folks buying up the state, but I don’t make the Wellstones for killers.”
“You were at Heartbreak Ridge, Sheriff?”
“What about it?”
“Places like that have a way of altering our views on our fellow man.”
“I saw things I don’t talk about, if that’s what you mean. But I don’t believe in the notion that everybody is a potential killer,” he said.
I didn’t pursue it. I told him about my encounter with Candace Sweeney and her friend named Troyce who had gotten the attention of Jamie Sue’s driver because he had been showing a photograph to members of the audience. “I got the guy’s tag number. I’d like to run it,” I said.
“Who do you think he is?”
“Not who he pretends to be,” I replied.
“Come back in an hour.” He paused. The glare through his office window silhouetted his face, and I could not read his expression. “Mr. Robicheaux?”
“Call me Dave.”
“Your friend Purcel is on a short tether.”
“Clete’s a good man, Sheriff.”
“So is my son-in-law. I just put him in jail for carrying a firearm into Stockman’s bar.”
Molly and I walked to a religious store two blocks from the courthouse. It was a fine morning, the sunshine bright on the mountains that ringed the town, the wind smelling of the river, the streetlamps hung with baskets of flowers, the main thoroughfare filled with bicyclists on a run to Flathead Lake. I kept thinking about the sheriff’s words. He had said the deaths of the two college kids and the California tourists at the rest stop were probably random killings. I thought he was sincere, but I also believed his attitude was facile. In a sense, most killings are random. The causality of violence of any kind is more complex than we think, a homicidal act in particular. The latter is usually the conclusion of a long sequence of events and involves players who will never be brought to task for the actual crime. Rocky Graziano made a career out of bashing in his father’s face in prizefight rings while the crowds cheered. I knew a Navy SEAL who cut the throat of a sleeping Vietcong political operative and painted the dead man’s face yellow so his wife could find him that way in the morning. He told me it was his fervent wish that his own wife could wake by her lover in a similar fashion.
The term “serial killer” is equally specious. I’ve known racists who I suspected participated in lynchings years ago. After the civil rights era passed and a general amnesia regarding their crimes set in, they found ways to position themselves in other situations where they could injure and even kill defenseless people. The irony is, after they ensconced themselves inside the system, their deeds were often considered laudable.
My point is that when people use the term “random” or “serial” in referring to a type of homicide, they are leaving out the element that is central to pathological behavior. The motivation is not financial. It’s not even about power. The attack on the victim is almost always characterized by a level of ferocity that is out of proportion to any apparent cause. Its origins reside in the id and are sexual and perverse in nature. The perpetrator’s appetites are insatiable, and his desire to do more injury increases as he releases his self-loathing and fury on his victim. That’s why family newspapers don’t include details about the physical damage done to the victims of sociopathic predators, and that’s why defense attorneys try to suppress morgue photos, and that’s why a lot of cops drink too much.
Molly walked with her arm in mine. “I think you’re on the right track. I think Sheriff Higgins is not.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“Let’s see what we learn at the store,” she said.
The bell rang on the door when we went inside the religious store. The owner was a very elderly woman, her back bent with bone loss, her eyes diffident over the top of her glasses. When I asked her about a wood cross attached to a leather cord, she removed a box filled with them from under the counter. “They’re made in India,” she said. “They’re three dollars apiece.” She waited, as though I were there to make a purchase.
I showed her the deputy sheriff’s badge Joe Bim Higgins had issued me and told her I was conducting a homicide investigation. She tilted her head up when she comprehended the gravity of the subject; the angle caused her eyes to magnify behind the lenses.
“Do you receive any large orders for these crosses?” I asked.
“Once in a while. Not often. A young people’s group has used them,” she replied.
“Which one would that be?”
“Just a moment. I’ll look.” She went into the back of her store and returned carrying a shoe box packed with sales slips. It took her a long time to find the purchase order. “Here it is,” she said. “It was a phone-in order.”
“From the Swan Valley?” I said.
“No, in Spokane. A Baptist church there runs a summer Bible camp. The children are given these as rewards for learning their Bible lessons.”
“Do you know the Wellstone family?” I asked.
“I know a Blackstone family. They used to live here in Missoula. Mr. Blackstone worked for the Forest Service. Is that who you mean? Since the timber industry has gone down, a lot of old customers have moved away. Mr. Blackstone was such a nice gentleman.”
I tried to hide my exasperation. I showed her the class yearbook photographs of Cindy Kershaw and Seymour Bell that Joe Bim Higgins had given me. “You remember either one of these kids?”
“I remember that one.” She pointed at the photo of Seymour Bell.
“How about the girl?” I asked.
She stared out the front window of the shop. There was a line of parking meters along the curb, and she seemed to be re-creating a scene that had taken place there. “The boy came inside. I’m not sure about the girl, though. A girl who looked like this one was with him. She was waiting for him by a big black car. She was mad about something. I remember thinking it was a shame a girl that pretty and young should have such a scowl on her face. I thought maybe it was the brightness of the day and the light hurt her eyes. But that wasn’t it. She was angry about something.”
“The boy came in by himself and bought the cross?” I said.
“No, a man was with him. I didn’t care for him. He had an odor.”
“An odor?”
“Like he’d been working outside and should have taken a shower. Or maybe he had been riding too long in a hot car, I don’t know. His clothes were pressed and clean, but he hadn’t showered. They had words outside.”
“Who did?”
“The girl and the man. She walked off, and the boy went after her. I think the man followed them in the car and they all went off together. I’m not sure.”
“Did the driver have a beard?”
“I don’t remember. He wore a blue suit and a white shirt without a tie. It was too hot a day to wear a navy blue suit. I think he even had a vest on.”
“What kind of car was he driving?”
“I didn’t pay attention. I think it was a dark color.”
I thanked her and left my business card on the counter, and Molly and I walked back toward the courthouse. I couldn’t sort out the information the owner of the religious store had given me. In truth, I had wanted her to tell me Jamie Sue Wellstone or her husband or brother-in-law had either come into the store or phone-ordered the crosses. I had grown to dislike the Wellstones for many reasons, maybe because they were rich and powerful and arrogant, maybe in part because Jamie Sue had dragged my friend Clete Purcel into her life. Regardless, I didn’t like them, and I wanted to bring them down. I doubted there was any tie between the Baptist Bible camp in Spokane and the cross Seymour Bell had worn. The big question was the identity of the driver who had accompanied Seymour into the store. Was it Quince? He didn’t seem like the kind of man Cindy Kershaw and Seymour would be attracted to.
“Maybe Seymour Bell’s purchase of the cross didn’t have anything to do with the Wellstones and their religious crusade,” I said.
“It did,” Molly said.
“Why?”
“People don’t buy a wood cross on a leather cord for ornamental reasons. The cross is important to the person who wears it because it was earned. It’s not a piece of jewelry. It’s a badge of merit.”
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at her. “Wait here a minute,” I said.
The bell above the door rang again when I reentered the religious store. “Who paid for the cross, ma’am?” I asked.
She thought about it. “The man,” she said. “His wallet was on a chain, the kind that loops around into the back pocket, even though he was wearing a suit. He counted out three one-dollar bills and made me give him a receipt.”
“Do you keep copies of your receipts?”
“Not for walk-in purchases like that. I tore it off the cash register and handed it to him.”
“You’ll call me if he comes back, won’t you?”
“I’m not sure I will. When something like this happens, I think the devil is involved in it. I think it’s a mistake to believe otherwise. I think it’s a mistake to put your hand in it.”
This was the best source of information I had found so far regarding the origins of Seymour Bell’s wood cross.
When Molly and I got back to the courthouse, the sheriff told me the SUV I had asked him to run was registered in the name of Troyce Nix, a supervisory employee at a contract penitentiary in West Texas. Joe Bim said I could call a deputy sheriff by the name of Jeff Rawlings if I wanted more information. “You think this fellow is worth all this trouble?” he asked.
“Probably not,” I said.
He gave me the use of a spare office, and I called an extension at a sheriff’s department in a rural county east of the Van Horn Mountains. Jeff Rawlings explained that he had been one of four investigative sheriff’s deputies who had interviewed Troyce Nix at his bedside in an El Paso hospital. At first Rawlings was taciturn and noncommittal, and I had the feeling he did not want to revisit his experience with Nix. “Has he got hisself in some kind of trouble up there?” he asked.
“I met him at a revival while I was investigating a double homicide. He seemed to be looking for somebody. I’d like to find out who.”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“I had the sense he doesn’t easily share information.”
“Nix is on paid medical leave from a contract prison. He’s also a major stockholder in the prison. So he might be on leave a long time. He has a hunting camp not far from the prison. He had a convict under his supervision at the camp when he said a tramp come out of the bedroom closet with a shank and cut him up. According to Nix, the convict was digging postholes when it happened. Nix says the tramp must have come in from the highway and was robbing the house when Nix and the convict drove up. The tramp hid in the closet, and when Nix opened the door, the tramp sliced him up. The convict took off with the truck, and Nix called 911 on his cell. That’s the story.”
“You’re not convinced that’s the way it went down?”
“There was blood all over the bedroom. He was lying in a ball on the floor when the paramedics got there. But there was also blood behind the house. He says he went outside and tried to get the convict to help him, but the convict had took off.”
“What’s Nix’s background?”
“I was afraid you’d get to that.”
I waited, but he didn’t speak. “He’s an ex-felon?” I said.
“Nix worked as an MP at Abu Ghraib. It got him kicked out of the army. So he got into jailing on a privatized basis. I hope he’s up there enjoying y’all’s alpine vistas. I hope he ain’t up there for other purposes.”
“Like what?”
“No comment.”
“Was the convict under his supervision ever caught?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“You think he’s the guy who cut up Nix?”
“There’s no motivation. The boy was half-trusty and probably gonna make parole at his next hearing. Every write-up Nix put in his jacket was positive. For me, the convict as suspect don’t add up. But nothing about Nix does. If you figure it out, give me another call.”
“What’s the background on the convict?”
“He was down for grand auto, but the way I understand it, his real crime was stopping a pimp from beating up a chippie in a parking lot. The pimp happened to be the nephew of the meanest bucket of goat piss to ever sit on the Texas bench. I wrote up my report on all this and shut the drawer on it. I don’t think Nix belongs in law enforcement. I don’t think the kid belonged in a contract jail. But I don’t get to make the rules. Anything else?”
“What’s the escaped convict’s name?”
“Jimmy Dale Greenwood. Some of the other cons called him Jimmy Git-It-and-Go ’cause he was a guitar-picking man.”
JAMIE SUE WELLSTONE and her husband kept separate bedrooms, not at her request but at his. Leslie Wellstone was an insomniac and wandered the corridors and downstairs rooms of his enormous house in slippers and robe for hours on end, sometimes reading under a lamp, sometimes fixing warm milk that he didn’t drink. Perhaps his life of sleeplessness was due to his war injuries. Perhaps it had other causes. Whatever the cause, he never discussed it. Leslie Wellstone never complained and never discussed personal matters of any kind.
He was undemanding in his attitude toward Jamie Sue. She could buy anything she wanted and go anywhere she wanted. The best care possible was available for her child. Her driver, Quince, would probably lay down his life for her. A wave of her hand, the tinkle of a bell, a touch of her finger on the house speaker system could summon any type of domestic or security personnel she wanted. There were implicit understandings about her and her husband’s sexual congress and the number of times a month they entered into it, but it was never he who initiated it. She left her bed and came to his of her own accord, usually in the dark, just before sunrise, when she woke hot and disturbed and filled with longing from a dream she would never tell him about. She didn’t hold back when she made love with Leslie, but she did it with her eyes closed, thinking of the man in the dream, thinking perhaps just momentarily of the terrible trade-off that had made her despise herself and wonder if her soul was forfeit.
Then she would lie beside him, her naked body damp under the sheets, his hand in hers, and try to convince herself there was redemption in charity and that maybe even in committing sin, she had brought a degree of happiness into a blighted man’s life.
It was in moments like these that she saw into another corner of Leslie’s soul. She wondered if, inside his veneer of gentlemanly manners and self-deprecating humor, he had found ways to mock and injure her. Worse, she wondered if his cynical statements were made with forethought and in contempt of her poor education and background. In the predawn hours of the morning after the revival on the res, she had gone into Leslie’s bedroom and undressed and gotten in bed beside him. After they had completed their particular form of lovemaking, he had disentangled himself from her and lay quietly in the gloom, staring at the ceiling, his breath as audible as wind whistling in a dry pipe.
“Is everything all right, Leslie?” she asked.
“I was curious about your rotund friend.”
“Who?”
“Purcel is the name, isn’t it? I bet he’s a ton of fun to bounce around with.”
She started to speak, but he turned on his side and touched his finger to her lips. “I have a question about the way you keep your eyes shut even though the room is dark.”
“Leslie, don’t.”
“Tell me, when you’re going at it, really outdoing yourself, do you secretly feel you’re on top of a giant crustacean?” he said.
Then she knew that the man lying next to her believed in and respected absolutely nothing, and, if confronted with his nihilism, would probably ask her why it had taken her so long to figure that out.
AT NOON SHE had Quince drive her and her son to the café on Swan Lake. She carried her son on her shoulder and got a high chair from the waitress and set the little boy inside it, then ordered a grilled cheese sandwich for him and a buffalo burger for herself. After Quince ordered, Jamie Sue called the waitress back and asked her to bring a gin gimlet from the saloon next door. “Would you like something from the bar, sir?” the waitress said to Quince.
“Just the food I ordered. Water is good,” he replied, tapping his nail on the water glass that was already full.
After the waitress was gone, Jamie Sue said, “You can have a beer if you like.”
“Thank you just the same, Miss Jamie.”
“I’ve never seen you drink.”
“I’m hired to drive y’all. That means with a clear head. You know that alcohol stays in the bloodstream for three weeks?”
“No, I didn’t know that. But you’re a loyal employee, Quince.”
“That’s a fine compliment coming from you, Miss Jamie.”
She let the personal nature of his remark pass and looked out onto the lake. She could see the wind cutting long V’s in the surface, and Swan Peak rising into the clouds, blue-black against the sky, as sharply delineated as the edges of a broken razor blade. Her gimlet glass was frosted with cold when the waitress brought it, and she drank it empty in three swallows, the gin sliding down inside her like an icicle starting to melt. The food had not been placed in the serving window that separated the kitchen from the counter area, and she called the waitress back and ordered another gimlet.
“Miss Jamie, I heard about you in Miss’sippi, long before I went to work for the Wellstones. I listened to your music on a station up in Tennessee. The jukebox up at the café had a couple of your songs on it,” Quince said. “People played them all the time. People said you were as good as Martina McBride.”
“Yes?” she said.
“Liquor always messed me up. I’d have these blackouts and wake up with spiders crawling all over the room. I’d have memories that didn’t make any sense. That’s what I was trying to say. A lady like you don’t need to-”
“You shouldn’t worry about me, Quince. We’re all doing fine here. Has Mr. Leslie said something about me? Are you troubled in some way?”
His face blanched. “No ma’am, I mean he didn’t say anything to me. I ain’t a bedpost, though. I hear things. I’m supposed to look out for you.”
Quince kept talking, trying to undo his ineptitude, but she heard nothing else of what he said, as though his lips were moving beyond a piece of soundproof glass. The waitress brought her the gimlet, then came back with their plates. Jamie Sue cut the little boy’s grilled cheese sandwich into small strips that he began eating with his fingers, smiling with a mouthful of toasted bread and yellow cheese. She let her own food grow cold on the plate and drank from her gimlet and looked out on the lake and thought about a scene many years ago in a little town in Texas at the bottom of the old Chisholm Trail.
It was a historical place in ways that nobody cared about. The most dangerous gunman in the West, John Wesley Hardin, had grown up in Cuero, right down the road. Bill Dalton’s gang used to hide out there after robbing trains and banks. The biggest herds of cattle ever assembled were put together there and trailed across the Red River, through Indian territory, all the way to the railhead at Wichita. The Sutton-Taylor feud, probably the worst outbreak of violence in the postbellum South, began with the rope-dragging and murder of a cowboy on her grandfather’s ranch.
In reality, she did not care about these things. When she thought about the town where she had grown up, she thought in terms of images and faces rather than events, of kind words spoken to her, of a time when she believed the world was an orderly and safe place where she was loved and one day would be rewarded because she was born pretty in a way that very few little girls were pretty.
Her father, an oil-field roustabout who was barely five feet five, had left one lung at Bougainville and had fixed the other one up with two packs of Camels a day. But he and his wife, a woman born without sight, had opened up a hamburger joint and for five years had made a living out of it and a truck patch they irrigated with water they hand-carried in buckets from a dammed-up creek. Each noon during the summer months, except Sunday, when they attended an Assembly of God church, Jamie Sue’s mother fixed her grilled cheese sandwiches in the café kitchen and let her eat them with the customers at the counter. Every day she drank a Triple X or a Hires root beer with her sandwich, and was the darling of the cowboys and pipeliners and long-haul drivers who frequented the café. Then her father took his last trip to the cancer ward at the U.S. Navy hospital in Houston and died while smoking a cigarette in the bathroom.
The hamburger joint became a video store, and Jamie Sue and her mother lived on welfare and the charity of her grandfather, who owned the remnants of a dust-blown ranch that was blanketed by grasshoppers and filled with tumbleweed and dead mesquite trees. The grandfather cooked on a woodstove and had no plumbing. If a person wanted to bathe, he did it in the horse tank. If he wanted to relieve himself, he did not go to the outhouse, or at least one that would be recognized as such. The “outhouse” consisted of a plank stretched across two pine stumps. The disposal system was a shovel propped against a scrub oak.
In revisiting her childhood, Jamie Sue did not dwell on the years she had lived at her grandfather’s. Instead, she tried to remember the grilled cheese sandwiches that she ate in her parents’ café, and the attention and love she saw daily in the faces of their customers.
The only problem with traveling down memory lane was that you didn’t always get to chart your course or destination. In her sleep, she sometimes heard grasshoppers crawling drily over one another on a rusted window screen, matting their bodies into the wire mesh, blotting out the stars and shutting down the airflow. She saw herself pulling wood ticks off her skin and sometimes out of her scalp, where they had embedded their heads and grown fat on her blood. The admiring patrons of the café were gone, and the only men who took a personal interest in her were the occasional caseworkers from the welfare agency who, while checking off items on a clipboard, asked her if she bathed regularly and whether she had seen worms in her stool.
“I’m going to the restroom. Would you watch Dale for me, please?” she said to Quince.
“Yes ma’am, I’ll make sure he chomps it all down. He needs to drink all his milk to be strong, too. Don’t you, little fella? You all right, Miss Jamie?”
“Of course I am, Quince. What a silly question,” she replied.
When she went into the restroom, she felt the floor tilt sideways. Was it the gin on an empty stomach, or was she coming down with something? No, the gin was not the problem. She felt worse when she didn’t drink it. So how could the problem be connected to her alcohol intake or the time of day when she drank it? If Leslie had not spoken so cynically to her, she wouldn’t have needed the drink. She didn’t crave alcohol, she was not addicted to it. It served to anesthetize her temporarily, but what else was she supposed to do? Excoriate herself because her husband talked to her like she was white trash and stupid on top of it?
Years ago another dancer at the topless club where she used to work started attending A.A. meetings for reasons Jamie Sue didn’t understand. As far as she knew, her friend did a few lines now and then and, on her day off, might drink a few daiquiris on a rich man’s boat, but she wasn’t a lush or a junkie. When Jamie Sue told the friend that, seeking to reassure her, the friend replied that the chief symptoms of alcoholism were guilt about the past and anxiety about the future, that the booze and the coke and the weed were only symptoms.
Those words never quite went away.
After Jamie Sue washed and dried her face and put on fresh makeup, she went to the bar and sat on a stool, waiting for her head to stop spinning. The daytime bartender walked over to her and leaned on his arms. “Want another gimlet, Ms. Wellstone?”
“Can you make an Irish coffee?”
“We don’t get a lot of calls for that one. But let’s see what I can come up with,” Harold replied.
He poured coffee into a tall glass from a carafe on the back bar, then added a brimming shot of Jack Daniel’s and covered the top with whipped cream he sprayed from a can. He inserted a spoon in the glass and wrapped the glass with a napkin and set it on the bar. Then he placed another napkin and a sugar cube beside the glass.
“How much is that, Harold?”
“It’s on me. It’s not very professionally done.”
“That’s very kind. I don’t want you to get in trouble with your employer, though.” She took a ten-dollar bill from her purse and placed it on the bar.
He gathered up the bill in his palm. “Mr. Wellstone with you today?” he asked.
“No, he’s not,” she replied.
He brushed at his nose with the back of his wrist and looked out at the lake. “I wonder if I can ask you a favor.”
“What is it?”
“Just say no and I’ll understand.”
She felt her impatience growing, as though an annoying person were pulling on her sweater to get her attention. She let her eyes go flat and drank from her glass without speaking.
“I got a camera here. If I ask Betty in there to take our picture, would you mind?” he said.
“No, of course I wouldn’t mind. You asked about Leslie. Did you want to talk to him about something?”
“No, not really. He seems like a nice gentleman, is all I was saying. I bet he was a brave soldier.”
“You’d have to ask him.”
“Ma’am?”
She felt the mixture of caffeine and bourbon and gin take hold in her nervous system, and not in a good way. Her stomach was sour, and pinpoints of moisture broke on her temples. The bartender called the waitress, then posed stiffly by Jamie Sue’s side, not touching her, while the waitress took their picture. “Thank you, Ms. Wellstone,” he said.
“You’re welcome,” she said, sitting back down. “Take this away, will you, and give me another gimlet, one as cold as those others were.”
“If that’s what you want.”
Of course that’s what I want, you idiot, or I wouldn’t have ordered it, she caught herself thinking.
“Sorry?” he said.
“You seem like a man of the world. Would you ever indicate to a woman she was your hired slut?”
The bartender’s mouth opened.
“The question isn’t meant to startle or to offend. Would you say something like that to a woman, any woman? Do you know any man who would?”
“No, Ms. Wellstone, I wouldn’t do that. I don’t associate with men who talk like that, either.”
“I didn’t think so. That’s why I asked. The gangster in the photograph with his girlfriend? Why would they come to Swan Lake? Didn’t they live in Beverly Hills? Why would anyone come here in the winter and build a snowman on the edge of a frozen lake? Didn’t she commit suicide? Didn’t she take an overdose of sleeping pills in Austria and lie down in a snowbank and go to sleep and wake up dead?”
“Ms. Wellstone, you’re really worrying me,” the bartender said.
“There’s nothing wrong with me, Harold. I wish you would not indicate there is. I wish that lake was full of gin. It looks like gin when the sun goes behind the mountains and the light fades, doesn’t it?”
“I guess you could say that.”
“Would you like to call up my husband and talk with him? Were you in a war, Harold? My father was. A Japanese soldier stuck a bayonet in his chest and destroyed his lung. My father pulled out the bayonet and killed the Japanese soldier with it. My husband wasn’t interested in the story.”
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.