Swan Peak (5 page)

Ten years later, he owned six producing fields in Louisiana and Texas, three ranches, a string of canneries, and an Austin radio station.

He bought a home in Houston’s River Oaks, a metropolitan oasis of trees and high-banked green lawns and palatial estates where success was a given and the problems of the poor and the disenfranchised were the manufactured concerns of political leftists. Unfortunately for Oliver and his family, financial equality in River Oaks did not necessarily translate into social acceptance.

Wildcatters like H. L. Hunt and Glenn McCarthy and Bob Smith may have respected him, but his peckerwood accent and fifth-grade education trailed with him like cultural odium wherever he went. The fact that his wife’s face could make a train turn onto a dirt road didn’t help matters, either. At formal dinners Oliver stuffed his napkin inside his collar and sawed his steak like a man cutting up a rubber tire, then ate it with his fork in his left hand, dunking each bite in obscene amounts of ketchup. A columnist in the
Houston Post
said his head looked like a grinning alabaster bowling ball. He had a phobia about catching communicable diseases, washed his hands constantly, and on cold days wore two flannel shirts under his suit coat and refused to take off his hat indoors. Every day of his life he ate a Vienna-sausage-and-mayonnaise sandwich for lunch and walked eight blocks to his office rather than put money in a parking meter. At any café he frequented, he loaded up on free toothpicks at the cashier’s counter. When Oliver and his wife applied for membership in one of Houston’s most exclusive country clubs, their application was denied.

That was when Oliver returned to his holy-roller roots, in the same way a man returns to a homely girlfriend whose arms are open and whose heart makes no judgments. Pentecostals speaking in tongues and writhing in the spirit or dipping their arms in boxes of snakes might seem bizarre to some, but tent crowds all across Texas recognized Oliver as one of their own. When Oliver gave witness, there was rapture and sweetness in their faces. No one there was overly concerned about stories of Oliver’s involvement with slant drilling or stolen seismograph reports or, in one instance, pouring lye in the eyes of a competitor. If he was challenged by a fellow believer about the contradiction between his philanthropy and the sources of his wealth, Oliver’s response was simple: “There is nothing the devil hates worse than seeing his own money used against him. Let the church roll on!”

But Oliver’s sons turned out to be nothing like him. What they were is much more difficult to describe than what they were not.

ONE WEEK HAD
come and gone since Molly had backed Albert’s pickup into the Wellstone limo. Then another week passed, and I heard nothing more about either the accident or the murder of the two university students. Perhaps in part that was because I avoided watching the news, hoping I could slip back into the loveliness of the season, the mist in the trees at sunrise, the smell of horses and wood smoke on the wind, the summer light hanging in the sky until ten P.M.

Fond and foolish thoughts.

Saturday night a downpour drenched the valley and knocked trees over on power lines and washed streams of gravel down the hillsides. During the storm, for reasons I can’t explain, I dreamed of the Louisiana of my youth. I saw the slatted light that glowed at dawn through the shutters on my bedroom windows. I saw the pecan and oak trees in our yard, the fog off the bayou like cotton candy in the branches. I heard my mother gathering eggs for our breakfast in the barn, and I heard my father loading his crab traps and hoop nets in the back of his stake truck. I could smell the humus back in the swamp and the fecund odor of fish spawning and the night-blooming flowers my mother had planted in her garden. Not far from our home, vast expanses of green sugarcane were swirling in the wind, as though beaten by the downdraft of helicopter blades, backdropped by a sky that was piled with blue-black thunderheads.

It was V-J Day 1945, and my half-brother, Jimmie, and I were safe in our home because our countrymen had driven both the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese from the earth. In the dream, I heard my father drive away in his stake truck, and I saw my mother look up the dirt road toward a parked Ford coupe. Sitting behind the steering wheel was a blade-faced man in a fedora who, like a scale-covered creature of long ago, patiently waited to enter our green-gold Eden on the bayou.

When I woke from the dream, I went into the kitchen and sat a long time in the darkness by myself. The sky was black, the rain thundering on the cabin’s roof. The dream was one I had carried with me from Louisiana and the Philippines to Vietnam. It dealt with a sense of loss that I knew I would never get over. My parents had done the worst thing human beings are capable of doing to themselves: They had destroyed their own home and all those in it, including themselves. But the dream was about more than my own family. The world in which I had grown up was gone. The country I live in is not the one of my birth. It might seem so to others, but it is not, no matter what they say.

Molly sat down beside me in the darkness. Before she married a sheriff’s detective with a history of alcoholism and violence, she had been a Catholic nun and nurse at Maryknoll missions in El Salvador and Guatemala, and had come to New Iberia to help organize the cane workers and build homes for the poor. She was wearing a white bathrobe, and when lightning flared above the mountains, she looked like an apparition. “Want to come back to bed?” she said.

“I think I’m up,” I said.

“Want me to start breakfast?”

“How about steak and eggs up at the truck stop?”

“Give me a minute,” she said, getting up from her chair, squeezing my shoulder.

I followed her into the bedroom. When she untied her robe and let it slip off her shoulders onto the bed, I could feel something drop inside me, like water draining through a hole in the bottom of a streambed, as if all the clocks in my life had suddenly accelerated and I couldn’t stop them. I put my arms around her and held her against me. Her shoulders and back were powdered with freckles, and her skin felt cool and smooth and warm under my hands, all at the same time. She had red hair, and it was thick and cropped on her neck, and it smelled of the perfume behind her ears. I squeezed her tight and bit her on the shoulder.

“You okay, Dave?” she said.

“Always,” I said.

LATER, WHILE MOLLY
and Clete and Albert were in Missoula, I mucked out the stalls in Albert’s barn and scrubbed out the horse tank and refilled it with fresh water from the secondary well he had drilled in his pasture. By noon the chill had gone out of the morning, and the sky was a hard blue, the valley bright with sunshine, the trees a deep green from the rain. I saw a waxed black convertible, the top down, coming up the road, the driver steering straight over the mud puddles rather than around them. Three people were inside. When they stopped by the rail fence at the foot of the pasture, I had no doubt who they were.

I pulled off my gloves and walked to the fence. The driver was a gold-haired woman who wore blue contact lenses and a halter that barely contained her breasts. A tiny bluebird, its wings spread, was tattooed above one breast. The man in back had a pair of aluminum forearm crutches propped next to him on the seat. But it was the man in the passenger seat whose face caused one to either look away or to stare into neutral space so as not to offend.

I tipped my hat to the woman and waited.

“Is either Albert Hollister or Clete Purcel at home?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Could I give them a message?”

“You can give Mr. Purcel this,” the man in back said. He handed me a tubular fly-rod case, then gathered up a paper sack from the floor and handed that to me, too. “There’s a creel and line and a reel and a box of flies in there, the best in Bob Ward’s store. Tell him I’m sorry about his gear being accidentally busted up on my property. Tell him I hope all of us are shut of this, too.”

“Maybe you should tell him, Mr. Wellstone,” I said.

He ignored me and slapped the back of the driver’s seat. The woman dropped the gearshift in reverse and backed down the road toward Albert’s driveway, then turned the convertible around and headed for the state highway.

I went back to work in the barn, glad they were gone. But a moment later, the woman stopped the convertible and backed all the way down the dirt road until she reached the gate to the pasture. Ridley Wellstone got out on his aluminum crutches, unfastened the chain on the gate, and began working his way across the pasture toward me, the bottom of his crutches sinking into the soft detritus of manure and dirt and rotted hay. I picked up a wood chair out of the tack room and reached him just as he was about to topple sideways.

“Sit down, sir,” I said.

“I didn’t come all the way out here just to deliver fishing tackle. You tell Mr. Hollister I want to talk to him, man to man, face-to-face,” he said.

“Why don’t you leave Clete and Albert alone? They haven’t done anything to harm you.”

“Leave
them
alone? This man Purcel has been following my security personnel around. Albert Hollister and a group of tree huggers filed an injunction against me. I can’t drill test wells on my own ranch.” He looked at my expression. “You didn’t know that?”

“What are you test-drilling for?”

“Oil and natural gas, if it’s any of your business.”

“You want to open up oil production on the Swan River?”

“You listen, Mr. Robicheaux: Once people know money is under the ground, they’re going to extract it. The only question is how and by whom. Better some than others, that make sense to you?”

“Not really, but I’ll tell Albert and Clete what you said.”

“You might also tell them I’m not the Antichrist and to stop treating me like I am. This is a fine-looking place. What if I told Mr. Hollister he shouldn’t string horseshit all over it, less’n he wants an injunction against him?”

I tried to think of a response, but this time he had me.

He began clanking on his crutches toward the gate. Then one crutch sank six inches in a soft spot, and he fell sideways into the mud, landing hard. He stared up at me, the blood draining from his cheeks. I tried to lift him, but he was deadweight in my hands and obviously in severe pain.

“Is it sciatica?” I said.

I heard the woman and the man with the disfigured face coming across the pasture.

“Get me up,” he whispered.

“I think you need the paramedics,” I said.

“Don’t let me lie in the mud like this.”

I got both arms under him and pulled him erect, then sat him down in the chair I had brought from the tack room. His chest was heaving, his suit spotted and smeared with mud. “Thank you,” he said.

“We’ll need to drive the car into the pasture. You mind if we open the gate?” the woman said.

“Of course I don’t mind,” I replied.

She went back for the car. The man with the ruined face lit a cigarette and put it in Ridley Wellstone’s mouth. Then he fitted his right hand on Ridley’s shoulder. Two fingers on his hand were missing, and the skin was shriveled so that the bones were pinched together and looked as small as those in a dried monkey’s paw.

“I’m Leslie Wellstone, Ridley’s brother.”

I waited for him to offer his hand, but he didn’t. “I’m glad to meet you,” I said.

“The woman is Jamie Sue. She’s my wife.” There was a mirthful light in his eyes, one that was not pleasant to look at.

“I see.”

“You do?” he said.

I had no idea what he meant, and I didn’t want to find out.

“Get me up,” Ridley Wellstone said.

“Give Ridley a saddle, and he’ll be sitting on one of your horses,” the brother said. “That’s how he fixed up his back. Ridley goes from hell to breakfast and doesn’t stop for small talk.”

“I said get me up and leave Mr. Robicheaux to his work.”

“How do you know my name?” I said.

Ridley Wellstone lifted his eyes to mine. “I know everything about you. You’ve killed over a half-dozen men.”

I felt my ears pop in the wind, or perhaps I heard a sound like a flag snapping on a metal pole. “Repeat that, please?”

He was breathing through his mouth; there were tiny flecks of spittle on his lips. “You’ve got blood splatter all over you,” he said. “Maybe you did it with a badge, but you’re a violent and dangerous man all the same. I don’t judge you for it. I just don’t want you dragging your grief into our lives.”

“
What
?” I said.

“I’ve known your kind all my life. Every one of you is a professional victim. If you had your way, we’d be studying Karl Marx instead of Thomas Jefferson. This whole country would be run by faggots and welfare recipients. A man of your experience and education knows this, but he’s at war with his own instincts. It’s nothing against you personal. I just want shut of you.”

I decided a little of the Wellstone family could go a long way.

CHAPTER 4

ONE MONTH EARLIER,
on a piece of baked hardpan out in West Texas, within sight of the shimmering outline of the Van Horn Mountains, a convict by the name of Jimmy Dale Greenwood was finishing his second year on a three-to-five bit, all of it served in a contract prison, courtesy of a judge who didn’t like half-breeds in general and smart-ass hillbilly singers like Jimmy Dale in particular.

The contract prison was a squat blockhouse nightmare that, except for the parallel rows of electric fences topped with coils of razor wire surrounding the buildings, resembled a sewage plant more than a penal facility. Most of the work done by the inmates was meant to be punitive and not rehabilitative in nature. In fact, both inmates and prison personnel referred to the work as “the hard road.” The hard road came complete with mounted gunbulls, leather-cuff ankle restraints, and orange jumpsuits that rubbed the skin like sandpaper in winter and became portable ovens in summer.

The majority of the personnel were not deliberately cruel. But drought and wildfires and the loss of family farms weren’t of their making, and shepherding prison inmates on a tar-patch crew beat delivering Domino’s pizzas or clerking at the adult-video store on the interstate. The line “It’s your misfortune and none of my own,” from the classic trail drover’s lament, seemed an accurate summation of the Texas contract gunbull’s attitude toward his charges.