“That’s why I’m calling. You remember when you gave me the background on the murder of Ridley Wellstone’s ex-wife and stepdaughter? You said the Harris County Sheriff’s Office and Houston PD thought the target might have been the stepdaughter rather than the wife, because the daughter had dropped the dime on an Australian porn actor after she got pinched holding a brick of marijuana.”
“You have to forgive me if the details are a little vague,” she said.
“One of the homicide victims up here was a porn film producer from Malibu. Maybe it’s just coincidence.”
“Could be,” she said.
I couldn’t blame her for her level of response. She had enough to do in the post-Katrina, post-Rita world of southern Louisiana, a place that had once been an almost Edenic paradise. Now I was calling from thousands of miles away and, like the obsessed man railing in sackcloth, expecting others to rally to my cause.
“Run a guy by the name of Harold Waxman for me,” I said. “He’s a bartender and a seasonal truck driver.”
“You’re calling him a person of interest?”
“I don’t know what he is. Maybe he’s just a bartender and part-time truck driver. None of this stuff makes any sense. Remember the name of Sally Dio?”
“From Galveston?”
“There’s a possibility he’s still alive and posing as Leslie Wellstone. I asked him in French how his family in Galveston was doing. He said fine, in French, but maybe he didn’t hear the entirety of my question.”
Whatever degree of interest she’d had was now totally gone. “How’s Clete?” she asked.
“He says he might move to California.”
“Right,” she replied.
That was the best statement I’d heard all day.
THAT EVENING JIMMY Dale Greenwood camped in a grove of pine trees on Flathead Lake. He created a tent by tying a cord between two tree trunks and hanging his poncho over it, then he spread his sleeping bag under the poncho and started a fire inside a ring of stones he had gathered from the water’s edge. When the fire was hot and had begun to crumble into ash, flaring with even greater heat under the blackened logs, he opened a can of pork and beans and set it to bubbling on a flat stone. Then he made two cheese sandwiches and toasted them inside a sheet of foil that he curled up on the sides. While his food cooked, he drank a soda and watched the sun burn into a spark on the far side of the lake.
Down the beach, someone was playing a guitar. Jimmy Dale rested his head on his duffel bag and could feel the stiff outline of the Remington pump inside the cloth.
Tomorrow would be the day that decided the rest of his life, he thought. He could say in all honesty he did not fear death. Once born, you were already inside eternity, not preparing for it. Existence was a deep pasture that had no fence across it. Jimmy Dale’s grandfather, who had been a shaman, had said that embarking upon the Ghost Trail was not a passage as much as a sharpening of his vision. Unfortunately, being unafraid of death was not the same as being brave.
If you were indeed brave, you had to face your greatest fear and overcome it. Jimmy Dale had no doubt what his greatest fear was. But he was not going back to prison to overcome it. If others wished to be buried under concrete and steel to demonstrate their spiritual courage, they could have at it.
The first stars were twinkling in the sky. If he died tomorrow, he died tomorrow, and to hell with the white man’s jail. Perhaps death was nothing more than drifting like ash among the stars, or living inside the rain and wind, or being part of a celestial being that could never be locked inside a cage.
Chief Joseph, before he was sent in chains to Oklahoma, said, “I will be where I am.” You just have to remember words like those, Jimmy Dale told himself.
He balanced his can of soda on his forehead as he stared up at the sky. He placed his arms straight out at his sides and felt like he was floating through space, in control, beyond the grasp of men like Troyce Nix and Leslie Wellstone.
Tomorrow he would hitch a ride into Arlee, on the Flathead res, and go to a bar where Jamie Sue had told him he would find a used Toyota with the keys in a magnetized box under the left fender. Then he would pick up her and Dale outside a department store in Kalispell at exactly seven P.M.
It would all happen tomorrow. Alberta and British Columbia waited for the three of them, the chains of lakes through the Canadian Rockies like giant blue teardrops backdropped by mountains whose peaks rose through the clouds.
The wind gusted off the lake, showering pine needles down on his face, and he felt the soda can tilt on his forehead. Before he could catch it, it fell on his chest, its contents pooling in the folds of his shirt.
ON SATURDAY I woke in the early A.M. It was black outside, and the air was dense and humid, stained with the stench of a fire over in Idaho. I could hear the horses in the dark, clattering against the railed fence, a shoed hoof sparking on a flat rock.
I didn’t want to think about fire in the hills or the fire that could have consumed Clete Purcel. I didn’t want to think about the events unfolding around us. But I did, and I got up from the bed while Molly was still in a deep slumber. I turned on the reading lamp in our small living room and pulled the magazine from my forty-five and cleaned and oiled all the parts and ran a bore brush through the barrel, then inserted a folded scrap of white paper in the chamber to reflect the lamp’s glow through the rifling, which was now clean and unnicked in appearance and spiraling with an oily light.
One by one, I thumbed the rounds free from the magazine, tested the tension in the spring, and pressed each round down against the spring again, until the last round notched tight under the steel lip at the top of the magazine. I released the slide before I pushed the magazine into the butt of the gun so the chamber would remain empty, then I put the gun in its leather holster and snapped the strap across the hammer and set the holstered gun on the table and looked at it.
My 1911-model army forty-five had never let me down. As a second lieutenant in Vietnam, I had carried one that was official-issue, and the one I brought home I had purchased from a Vietcong prostitute in Saigon’s Bring Cash Alley. For years I slept with a gun under my bed. So did Audie Murphy. He once said for every day on the firing line, you have to spend five days in the normal world before you can sleep again. Because he had been in combat for almost four years, he believed he had been condemned to twenty years of sleeplessness. His gambling addiction cost him two million dollars but did not purchase him one hour’s rest. He put a bed in his garage and spent his nights there because his wife could not sleep with an armed man wired for sounds that no one else could hear.
All of that made perfect sense to me.
I picked up the forty-five and rested it on my knee. It was heavy and cool in my hand, an old friend that represented power and control over one’s environment and the ability to call down lightning and fire on one’s enemies. Do not go gently into that good night, the poet said. Rage against your fate and protest it to death’s door. Don’t buy into the lie that the good die in bed, either. A dying man’s bed is stained with phlegm and urine and feces and the pus leaking from his sores. Doc Holliday coughed his lungs into a nun’s cupped hands, his guns hanging in a closet, his last sight of the earth a windswept Colorado plateau that could have been moonscape. I doubt that he would have recommended his fate to others.
I touched my hand to my head. My skin seemed to be on fire. Heat lightning flared in the sky, and I heard horses’ hooves thudding across the pasture, muffled inside the grass. I wished the sounds were human, not those of animals. I wished my enemies were out there so I could lock down on them with iron sights and blow them all over the serviceberry trees. I wished Death himself would confront me and release me from his taunts and allow me to deal on equal terms with him. Like the fool in a medieval morality play, I wanted the rules of mortality rewritten for me.