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 needed to do something about it.
“How about the pope? You need to chat him up today?” I said.
“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.
“The difference between the black and white races?” his daddy used to say. “There ain’t none. It’s a state of mind, not a matter of pigmentation. Let rich people treat you like a nigra, you are one.”
Quince believed what his daddy said. Folks look at you the wrong way, their nostrils thin and white around the rims like the air has gone bad, their eyes not seeing you when you look back at them, you educate them regarding the potential of a man who’s been treated with a lack of respect. Back in the 1960s, Quince’s uncle had been a city marshal in a little town nobody would take time to wipe his ass on. He pulled over a homegrown black boy and two white boys from up north for driving five miles above the speed limit. When their bodies were dug out of an earthen dam, everyone thought they had died because they were registering black voters. Maybe part of that was true, but it wasn’t the real cause. The driver, this smart-ass Jewish college boy, had called Quince’s uncle “man.” Not “sir,” not “constable,” not even “mister.” Just “man.”
The legacy of violence in Quince’s family was as natural in their daily lives as the bitterness and sense of failure that greeted them with each sunrise. The Whitleys nursed their resentments and carried their reputation for lethality with them, using it as a silent weapon against their enemies, in the same way the dried sweat on their skin assailed the sensibilities of others and dared them to show any objection to it.
But living vicariously through the stories of lynchings and castrations Quince had heard as a child did nothing to relieve him of his anger. He had put in five years with the Wellstones, after an adult lifetime of working in a pesticide plant and hauling hogs to Chicago and breathing granary dust in a place called Texline on the New Mexico border. He had not only found a comfortable job and home, he had come to think of himself as an extension of the Wellstone estate. He always used the term “Wellstone estate” when he was asked where he worked. It rang with a sound and cadence like gold coin bouncing off a plate.
When Leslie Wellstone had brought Jamie Sue Stapleton home as his wife, Quince felt that starshine had been dusted on his own shoulders. Leslie Wellstone might have been educated and rich, and Leslie Wellstone might have fought in foreign wars over issues Quince knew nothing about, but Quince understood the world of country music and hardscrabble farms and picking cotton until the tips of his fingers bled. You didn’t learn those kinds of things at a snooty eastern university. Jamie Sue recognized one of her own as soon as she laid eyes on him, Quince told himself. In his own mind, he had become Jamie Sue’s blue-collar knight errant and personal adviser. Yes sir, Quince Whitley, a sharecropper’s son, was the bodyguard and friend in need of the most beautiful woman who had ever walked out on the Opry stage. He wondered what his old friends working at the roach-paste factory would have to say about that.
Now it was all blown to hell. He had tried to sell out the Wellstones to the hick with the big dick from Bumfuck, Texas, and had gotten his ass kicked in the process. Then he’d gone back on the job at the Wellstone compound, cutting grass, pretending to run off tree huggers who, if truth be known, didn’t exist, and driving Jamie Sue to the bar on Swan Lake so she could get enough brew in her to forget whom she had married.
Here he was on Thursday afternoon, driving the lawn mower across eighteen acres of yard the Wellstones and their friends played croquet and badminton on, the air hot and dry in ways it shouldn’t have been, columns of smoke rising from the timber on a distant mountain. The heat made him think of Mississippi and the burnt-out end of summer days when the sky was bitten with dust blowing out of the fields. Why did he feel that everything in his life was ending, that his life had been a long elliptical path that would take him back to the same world he had tried to flee?
The weather itself seemed to plot against him. He had come to the Big Sky for the big score, not for hot days that smelled of fires and reminded him of Mississippi, not to cut people’s grass, either, with clouds of grasshoppers lifting from the yellowed edges of the yard. He could feel a balloon of anger rising in his chest, one that actually pushed bile into his mouth and caused him to spit. Back home, people learned quick you didn’t dump on a Whitley. Your anger was a friend, a flag under which you conducted yourself and which made other people cross the street when they saw you coming. But now he had no one to vent his anger upon, and it was consuming him as though he had swallowed a chemical agent.
Just this morning Jamie Sue had taken off for the day, the Hispanic woman carrying her baby for her, the two of them walking past Quince like he wasn’t there. Quince wondered if she was still pumping it with that fat shit from New Orleans or if she was slipping off to meet this convict on the run, Jimmy Dale Greenwood. Maybe that was what galled him worst, he thought. Jamie Sue had an eye for anything in pants except Quince Whitley, the one person who had always admired and treated her with respect. That’s what he got for his loyalty, the switch of the hips while she passed him on the flagstones, her lower body silhouetted through her dress against the early sun, her nose lifted in the breeze, just like that bitch at the gas pump.
The tractor-mower throbbed between Quince’s thighs, calling up thoughts about other women in his life, some of them white, some black, but all of them aware you didn’t dump on a Whitley, by God.
His memories of the way he had dealt with other challenges to his pride earlier in life had almost set him free from his present misery when a rock exploded from the mower blade and smacked like a rifle shot against the picture-glass window in Leslie Wellstone’s study.
Leslie stepped out on the porch and motioned for Quince to cut the engine.
“Sorry about that, Mr. Wellstone,” Quince said.
“It might be a good idea to rake the lawn before you run the mower past the windows,” Leslie said.
“I did that, Mr. Wellstone,” Quince lied. “But I’ll do it again.”
“Maybe use a better rake, one with finer tines.”
Quince had gotten the point. Why was Wellstone pushing it? Because he liked rubbing his shit in Quince’s hair, Quince told himself.
“Maria went into Missoula with Ms. Wellstone. I need you to round up the garbage and tidy up,” Wellstone said.
“Sir?”
“The plastic bags are in the pantry. Empty all the wastebaskets in leaf bags, put plastic ties on them, and put fresh white bags inside the baskets. Make sure you get all the bathrooms. Take some Ajax and Windex and rags and clean the counters and mirrors and basins. Can you handle that?”
Quince could hear the wind blowing through the shrubbery. A grasshopper struck his eye and caused it to tear.
“Are you listening?” Leslie asked.
“That ain’t exactly what I usually do.”
“Then perhaps it’s time to expand your horizons.” Leslie smiled, showing his teeth.
“You got it, Mr. Wellstone,” Quince replied, restarting the engine. “Just soon as I make this last cut here.” Then he added under his breath, “Yassuh, boss, I’s sure on it.”
“What was that?”
“Said I’ll be right in there, Mr. Wellstone,” Quince replied above the roar of the engine, wheeling the mower away so Leslie could not see his expression.
Ten minutes later, Quince entered the back of the house through the attached garage and was told by the chef to remove his boots and to put plastic covers, like those a surgeon would wear, over his sock feet. Then he was given a huge black leaf bag and a handful of smaller white plastic bags threaded with red drawstrings and was told to begin his trash pickup under the kitchen sink, where a pile of pungent shrimp husks and spoiled potato salad waited for him.
He dragged his leaf bag throughout the mansion, filling it with all the residue and discarded material that filtered from farms and factories and stock brokerages throughout the nation into the daily lives of the Wellstones, feeding them, entertaining them, keeping them comfortable and satiated, and making them richer by the minute.
In Leslie Wellstone’s office, Quince emptied a tall plastic wastebasket filled with shredded strips of paper. But some of the pages Leslie had sent through the shredder were partially intact and Quince could see the name Vanguard Group at the top and columns of tax-sheltered municipal bond accounts that ran into double-digit millions. On Ridley Wellstone’s upstairs balcony, Quince emptied a champagne bucket filled with the chewed butts of illegal Havana cigars. In the bottom of Ridley’s bathroom wastebasket was a used rubber. The Hispanic maid must be putting in some overtime, Quince thought. But actually, he could live with picking up the detritus of the rich and tolerating their hypocrisy. Why? Because he had been onto their secrets for a long time. The rich were no smarter than he was, no better at dealing with the world, no more worthy of their wealth than the people they hired to clean up after them. He knew things about survival they couldn’t guess at. The only difference between him and the Wellstones was the difference between good luck and bad luck. The rich screwed down and married up. People like the Whitleys just got screwed.
What tore it for Quince was cleaning up in Jamie Sue’s bathroom. A small straw basket was filled with lipstick-smeared Kleenex. A plastic receptacle by the toilet contained her used tampons. Her fingernail clippings lay in a spray on the black marble countertop. Strands of her hair had to be pulled out of the drain with his fingers. A Q-tip blackened with eyeliner was stuck to the base of the toilet stool.
The chef had given Quince plastic covers for his feet but none for his hands. Thanks a lot, motherfucker.
When he finished cleaning Jamie Sue’s bathroom, he pulled the laden leaf bag down the back stairs, the garbage inside thudding heavily on each step. He opened the iron lid on the Dumpster and dropped the bag inside, a cloud of gnats and the smell of a week’s rotting produce rising with the heat into his face. He slammed the lid down as loudly as he could, hoping the sound reverberated through the wall into the house.
But his wishes were fulfilled in a way he hadn’t foreseen. When he turned around, Leslie Wellstone was staring at him, a frosted mint julep clutched in his right hand. “You out of sorts about something, Quince?” he said.
Quince could feel words forming in his mind that he had never spoken to a man of Leslie Wellstone’s background, words requiring an intimacy and a reciprocity of trust that he realized, for the first time in his life, he actually feared.
“Speak up. Are you not feeling well?” Leslie said.
“What would you do if folks spit on you, Mr. Wellstone? If they treated you like a nigra or white trash or like you didn’t have any dignity in their eyes?”
“Me? That’s a good question. Let me think on it a minute. Why, I don’t really know, Quince. It must be awful when somebody does that to a person,” Leslie replied.
You don’t even know what I’m asking you, do you? Quince said to himself. Shows how goddamn smart any of y’all are.
“I’d like to help you, Quince, but you got into it with that big fellow from Texas on your own,” Leslie said. “Why not just file charges against him? You’re not afraid of him, are you? That couldn’t be the case, could it?” Leslie Wellstone lifted his julep glass to his mouth and drank, his eyes brightening.
“Nobody disrespects a Whitley and gets away with it,” Quince said.
But Leslie Wellstone had lost interest in the conversation, and he went back into the house without replying. When he pulled the door into place behind him, the rubber seal along the jamb hissed from the compression of air inside. A fire had broken out above Swan Lake, and the bottoms of the clouds along the mountaintop had turned a soft red from the flames’ updraft. Quince felt as though ants were crawling across his brain.
Hurt them all, one by one, in ways they’ve never been hurt before, a voice inside him said. Get to Mr. Leslie Wellstone last, the way you save out a dessert. See if he’s got that smirk on his mouth then.
But where to start?
Quince walked toward the garage apartment he shared with Lyle Hobbs. What did the man from West Texas own that he couldn’t bear to lose?
Quince’s answer to his own question created an image in his mind that made him close his eyes and wet his lips, like a hungry man about to begin a fine meal.