Light of the World

Chapter 15

The cabin was built of field stones on a whiskey-colored, tree-shaded creek at the base of the Bitterroot Mountains. The smoke from the chimney flattened in the breeze and disappeared inside the blueness of a canyon that didn’t see full sunlight until midday. Sometimes there were bighorn sheep high up on the cliffs of the canyon, and in the fall, the sky would have the radiance and texture of blue silk and be filled with red and yellow leaves blowing from a place on the mountaintop that no one could see.

Clete thought about all these things as he parked the Caddy and walked up on the wood porch of the cabin and knocked, his heart beating hard.

She had a hairbrush in her hand when she opened the door. “You found it okay?” she said.

“I fish down here a lot. Dave and I fish here together. It’s always cool in the summer. One time in the fall, I backpacked way up that trail and saw a moose.”

Her eyes went past him, then came back on his. She touched the hair on her neck with the brush. “Your car looks like you just had it waxed.”

He turned around and looked at it as though observing it for the first time, wondering if the disingenuous nature of their conversation was as embarrassing to her as it was to him. “I just got it out of the shop. It got shot up when this guy from Kansas tried to kill my daughter. You want to sit out here?”

“No, come in. What did you say? A man from Kansas?”

“He was driving a truck with a Kansas tag. Maybe he’s Asa Surrette.”

“The psychopath that Mr. Robicheaux’s daughter interviewed in prison?”

“Yeah, he’s a bad guy. You told me you were afraid. What are you afraid of?”

She looked beyond him at an old red boxcar that lay desiccated and half-filled with rotting hay inside a grove of cottonwoods. “I don’t know what I’m afraid of. I feel a sense of loss I can’t get rid of. I think about Angel and how she died and what the killer probably did to her before he put a plastic bag over her head. I can’t get those images out of my mind. I hate my husband. I’d like to kill him.”

“Why?”

“Will you come in, please?”

He stepped inside. She closed the door behind him and turned the key in an old-fashioned lock. Then she went to the windows and pulled the curtains closed.

“Who do you think is out there?” he asked.

“I can’t be sure. Caspian is afraid of someone. More so than I’ve ever seen him. When he’s afraid, he’s cruel.”

“To you?”

“To anyone. I never knew a coward who wasn’t cruel. I had to make him bathe. No, I had to get Love to make him bathe.”

“I’m losing the picture here.”

“He wouldn’t take a bath or get in the shower. I told him I didn’t want him in our bedroom. Maybe he’s depressed. When people get depressed, they behave like that, don’t they?”

“Depressed over your daughter’s death?”

“I don’t know. I can’t think.” She sat down at a wood table, the hairbrush still in her hand. There was a vase of cut flowers on the table and another one on the kitchen windowsill. Her face looked freshly made up, her mouth glossy with lipstick that was too bright for her complexion, the streaks of brown in her hair full of tiny lights. “Nothing makes sense to me. Did this man Surrette kill our daughter?”

“Evidently, nobody saw her leave the Wigwam. Would she leave with somebody she didn’t know?”

“She was seventeen. A girl that age has no judgment.”

He sat down across from her. “Had she ever gone off with guys she didn’t know?”

“I tried to talk her into going to Alateen. She wouldn’t do it. Sometimes she’d come home at ten P.M. Sometimes she’d get dropped off at ten the next morning.”

“Would she go off with strangers, Felicity?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Who were her friends?”

“Druggies, boys on the make, kids who wanted access to her money.”

“Was she promiscuous?”

“Today they all are,” Felicity replied.

Clete looked around the cabin. The walls were pine, the floors constructed from railroad ties, the stone fireplace outfitted with steel hooks for cook pots. “What do y’all use this place for?”

“Hunting during big-game season. When Angel was younger, she had her friends out. We had ice cream parties on the bank of the stream.”

“Were Caspian and your daughter close?”

“I don’t know who Caspian is anymore.”

“Pardon?”

“When I met him, he was a different person. He had a brilliant mind for figures. He wanted to create a high-tech company and compete in the defense industry. He borrowed a half million dollars in start-up money from Love. Then he started gambling in Vegas and Atlantic City and Puerto Rico. Here’s the funny part. At the blackjack tables, he could count cards coming out of a six-deck shoe. He got banned from several casinos. Then they caught on to what he was doing.”

“I don’t understand. You said they caught on to him after he was banned.”

“They realized if they let him stay at the table, he would lose everything he had won and drop ten to thirty thousand on top of it. How sick is that?”

“That’s why they do it,” Clete said.

“Do what?”

“That’s why they gamble. They want to lose. They like to punish themselves. They want to feel there’s a cosmic plot working against them. Go into the bar at the track after the seventh race. It’s full of losers. They’re happy as hogs rolling in slop.”

She stared at him blankly. “I feel like an idiot.”

“Because you never figured out your husband?”

“Because I married him.”

“My ex gave our savings to an alcoholic Buddhist guru in Boulder,” Clete said. “This guru made people take off their clothes at poetry readings. My ex thought he was a holy man and I was a drunk cooze hound. Unfortunately, in my case, she was right.”

Felicity propped her elbow on the table and rested her chin on her hand. For the first time since he had come into the room, she smiled. “You always talk like that to women?”

“Only the ones I trust.”

Had he just said that?

“Why should you trust me?”

“Because we both grew up in the same part of New Orleans. Because everybody from Uptown knows what everybody else there is thinking. It’s probably like an A.A. meeting. There’s only one story in the room. We all come out of the same culture.”

The fear she had described seemed to have lifted momentarily from her soul. There was a warm light in her eyes. Her hair had the tone and variations of color you see in old hand-rubbed mahogany. “When you talk, you make me feel good,” she said.

“I’m an overweight former homicide roach, Miss Felicity. I’m still persona non grata at NOPD. That’s like being a top sergeant in the Crotch, then getting your stripes pulled. Dave Robicheaux sobered up and got his life back. I never could pull it off. Three days without a drink, and my head turns into a concrete mixer.” He could see her attention fading, the fear and concern creeping back into her face. “I got a bad habit,” he said. “I start talking about myself and put everybody to sleep.”

She touched the top of his hand. “No, you’re a nice man. I mentioned something about Caspian that you wouldn’t have a way of understanding. He asked Love if he believed in hell. Caspian has never had any interest in religion. Why would he ask Love a question like that?”

Clete shook his head. “Guilt?”

“If Caspian ever felt guilt about anything, I never saw it. He’s the most selfish human being I’ve ever known.”

The kitchen window was open, and the curtains were blowing in the breeze. They were printed with small pink roses and made Clete think of the flower bed that his mother kept behind their small house in the old Irish Channel. “I think I’d better go,” he said. “I have a way of getting into trouble, Felicity. Lots of it. The kind that doesn’t go away and leaves people messed up for a long time.” The disappointment in her face was not feigned. He was sure of that, or at least as sure as he ever was when it came to matters of the heart. He got up to leave.

“Do what you need to do,” she said.

He nodded and walked to the door and tried to turn the key in the lock.

“Here, I’ll get it,” she said. She twisted the key and opened the door, her shoulder brushing against his arm. She turned her face up to his. He could feel his manhood flare inside him. Her mouth was like a rose, her hair blow-dried and so thick and lovely that he wanted to tangle his fingers in it. “Clete?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“You like me, don’t you?”

“Do I? I’ve got a fire truck driving around inside my head.”

“My daughter and my father are dead. I don’t have anyone.”

She let her arms hang at her sides and leaned her forehead directly into his chest, as though in total surrender to him and the level of failure that characterized her life.

One hour later, as he lay beside her, all his good intentions gone and his sexual energies exhausted, he thought about a story he had read as a boy in the old city library on St. Charles. The story was about Charlemagne and Roland on their way to Roncevaux. He wondered if they and their knights ever gave heed to the horns echoing off the canyon walls that surrounded them, or if they galloped onward through the cool blueness of the morning, beside a tea-colored stream, inside the rhythmic sweep of the wind in the trees, never realizing that the littered field began with a romantic quest, one that was as inviting and lovely and addictive as the grace to be found inside a woman’s thighs.

I have never laid strong claim on rationality, in fact have often felt that its value is overrated. Let’s face it, life is easier if we maintain a semblance of reasonable behavior and hide some of our eccentricities and not say more than is necessary in our dealings with others. The same applies to our actions. Why attract attention? No one takes an accordion band to a deer hunt.

Like most people, I wonder why I don’t take my own advice.

The cave behind Albert’s house began to bother me. Had it provided shelter to Asa Surrette? Was the perversion of Scripture on the wall of no consequence? Was it not a hijacking of a Judeo-Christian culture on which most of our ethos is based, in this instance a hijacking by a subhuman abomination who should have been hosed off the bowl thirty seconds after his birth?

I found two empty wine bottles in Albert’s trash and filled them with gasoline I kept in a five-gallon can inside a steel lockbox welded to the bed of my pickup truck. I corked both bottles and carried them and the gas can up the hillside to the old logging road that traversed the mountain above Albert’s house. A doe with two fawns bounced through the trees ahead of me, flicking their tails straight up, the white underside exposed.

The area around the cave entrance had remained undisturbed. Inside the overhang, I could see the message. I began heaping deadwood and leaves and pine needles and big chunks of a worm-eaten stump that was as soft and dry as rotted cork, shoving it against the wall that contained the pirated lines.

I poured gasoline on the pile and set the can twenty feet from the cave opening, then lit a paper match and threw it inside the cave. The flame spread quickly over the fuel, climbing up the wall and flattening on the roof. Then I picked up the first wine bottle and flung it end over end into the fire. It broke against a fallen boulder and showered against the wall. Flames leaped from the cave, curling over the rim, scorching the overhang and singeing the grass and mushrooms that grew on top of it. I stepped back and tossed the second bottle inside. It landed on the deadwood and, seconds later, exploded from the heat rather than the impact. The fire was soon out of control, twisting in circular fashion, the flames feeding on themselves, spreading deeper into the cave, where there was probably a chimneylike opening drawing cold oxygen into the mixture of organic fuel and gasoline.

I could feel the heat on my face and arms and smell a stench that was like the odor of pack rat nests burning. I heard a sound behind me and looked over my shoulder and saw Albert laboring up the hill, sweating, his flannel shirt open on his chest, a fire extinguisher swinging from his hand. “What in the Sam Hill are you doing?” he said, out of breath.

“I thought I’d clean up the cave.”

“Why didn’t you napalm the whole mountain while you were at it?” He pulled the pin on the extinguisher’s release lever and sprayed the rim of the cave, then the inside. Huge clouds of white smoke billowed from the opening and floated through the treetops. “You know how to do it, Dave. What’s got into you?”

“I believe a genuinely evil man was up here, Albert. I believe he has no right to take language out of Scripture and deface the earth with it.”

“Sit down a minute.”

“What for?”

“I want to talk to you.”

I wasn’t up to one of Albert’s philosophic sessions. He’d had chains on his ankles when he was seventeen and had belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World and had known Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston. He’d followed the wheat harvest from the Texas Panhandle to southern Alberta and had been on a freighter that hit a mine in the Strait of Hormuz. He was a charitable and fine man, and I held him in the highest regard. There were also times when he could drive you crazy and make you want to throttle him.

“You were raised up in a superstitious culture,” he said. “When you let your imagination get the best of you, you start to see the devil’s hand at work in your life. The devil isn’t a man, Dave.”

“Then what is he?”

“Those goddamn corporations.”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“You’re going to whether you like it or not. They bust our unions and use coolie labor in China and buy every goddamn president we elect.”

“I can’t take this, Albert.”

“Those men who tried to kill Miss Gretchen were working for somebody. Who would that be? Satan or Love Younger?”

“A man like Younger doesn’t hire hit men.”

“You don’t know your enemy, Dave. You never did.”

“You want to translate that?”

“How’d your father die?”

“As the result of an accident. Don’t be using my old man in your polemics.”

He placed his hand on my shoulder. “All right, I won’t. But don’t hurt yourself like this. The enemy is flesh and blood, not a creature who wears a pentacle for a hat.”

I took the extinguisher and finished spraying the cave and the bushes around the entrance. “Better come have a look,” I said.

“What is it?” he said, getting to his feet.

“Check out the wall.”

He stood at the entrance, the smoke from the ash rising into his face, his eyes watering. “It’s an aberration caused by the heat,” he said.

I wanted to believe him, except in this case, I think Albert also had his doubts.

The message had probably been incised into the lichen with the point of a rock. The letters had not been cut much deeper than the moldy green patina. The intensity of the fire, augmented by two bottles of gasoline, should have burned the wall as clean as old bone. Instead, the letters were black and smoking, as though they had been seared into the stone with a branding iron.

“Don’t just walk away,” I said.

“I’m done with this foolishness, and I won’t discuss it with you or anybody else,” he replied. “Not now, not ever. You get yourself to a psychiatrist, Dave.”

At dawn on Sunday, Wyatt Dixon awoke to a sound that didn’t fit with either his dreams or the sounds he usually heard at daybreak. It was a sound like the pages of a book or magazine flipping in the breeze. Had he left a window open? No, the temperature had dropped last night, and he had shut and latched all of them. He sat up in bed and removed the sheathed bowie knife he kept under his pillow. He put on his jeans and limped barefoot and shirtless into the kitchen, his hair hanging in his face, his bad ankle wrapped with an elastic bandage.

She was sitting at the table, her long legs propped on a chair, reading a copy of People, a cup of Starbucks coffee in her hand. “What are you doing in my house?” he said.

“I didn’t want to wake you, so I let myself in,” Gretchen said.

“My door was dead-bolted.”

“It was dead-bolted until I got a coat hanger on it. Dave Robicheaux told me about the three guys who attacked you and your friend. How is she doing?”

“She’s home.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“They messed up her head proper.”

“You recognized a tattoo on one guy’s hand?”

He sat down across from her and stretched out one leg. “His glove slipped. I couldn’t hear his voice good inside the mask, but I saw the tattoo, and I knew where I’d seen it before.”

She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “You look a little hobbled up,” she said.

“It was a red spider. The gardener at Love Younger’s place had one like it. What are you aiming to do, Miss Gretchen?”

“Cook their hash, hon. Want to come along?” she said.

The saloon on North Higgins, down by the old train station, had been through a number of incarnations. For decades it was a brightly lit low-bottom watering hole where workingmen and terminal alcoholics could shoot pool and play pinochle and drink pitcher beer and bulk wine and whiskey at prices that had no peer, except for the Oxford down the street, which in the 1960s charged only five cents for a glass of beer. Academic writers and flower children tried to appropriate the saloon, but their presence was transitory and cosmetic, and the core clientele remained the same — old-time bindle stiffs, gandy dancers, marginal criminals, pullers of the green chain, reservation Indians who drank up their government checks on the fourth day of the month, gypo loggers, miners from Butte and furnace stokers from Anaconda, used-up prostitutes, and the biggest group of all, one that has no categorical name other than the people for whom the phrase “born to lose” was an anthem and not an apology.

Over a long period of time, the photographs of these people were taken by an eccentric and enormously talented daytime bartender named Lee Nye, who framed and hung them on the wall in rows down the length of the saloon. By the 1990s almost all of these Depression-era people were dead and forgotten. The ownership changed and the tobacco-stained floors were replaced, the restrooms painted and remodeled, and a small restaurant was installed in back. The saloon became a cheerful and crowded place in the evenings, full of laughter and free of smoke and worry about privation and disease and mortality.

The photographs of the men and women in tattered clothes remained, their toothless mouths collapsed, their faces wrinkled with hundreds of tiny lines, their recessed eyes containing a strange kind of radiance, as though they wanted to tell us a secret they’d never had a chance to share.

On Sunday evening a man riding a new white Harley flanged with polished chrome drove up the alley behind the saloon and parked next to the brick wall and entered through the back door. The man’s name was Tony Zappa. His eyes were pale and elongated, his hair braided in cornrows. He had the flat chest of a boxer and sun-browned skin as tight as latex on his frame. He did not pay attention to a chopped-down pickup truck with twin Hollywood mufflers that passed the alley and pulled to the curb just beyond the lee of the building.

A few minutes later, Gretchen Horowitz entered the saloon through the front door and went to the bar and stood next to Tony and ordered a beer. She put one foot on the brass rail and looked up at the flat-screen television on the wall. “You ever been in New Orleans?” she said.

“You talking to me?” Zappa said.

“Did you know that was Robert De Niro’s most famous line? It’s from Taxi Driver.”

“You saying I’m copying Robert De Niro?”

“No, I asked if you’d ever been in New Orleans.”

“I’m from Compton by way of Carson City. Know what I mean?”

“Not exactly.”

“Compton is where you go if hell is overcrowded.”

“Wednesday night is yuppie night in New Orleans,” she said. “That’s what this place reminds me of, except tonight is Sunday.”

“You don’t sound like you’re from New Orleans.”

“What do people from New Orleans sound like?”

“Part Italian, part boon, although I hear a lot of the boons got washed out during Katrina,” he said. “You want a shot to go with that beer?”

“Long day, boss. Another time.” Her attention seemed to fade. She yawned and looked up at the television screen.

“I say something wrong?”

“No, I need to get something to eat.”

“I bet you wear contacts.”

“You’re going to tell me something about my eyes?”

“They’re violet. You got reddish hair with violet eyes. It’s not something you see every day.”

“I was conceived in an in vitro dish. The male donor was a package of purple Kool-Aid.”

“That’s pretty good.”

“You took a slide on your bike?”

He gazed at her, puzzled.

“The bruises on your arms and neck. I saw you on Higgins a little while ago. You were riding a white Harley.”

“You were looking at me?”

“What’s the spider on your hand mean?”

“You know what Compton is like if you’re white or Hispanic?”

“You’re lunch meat?”

“Ever hear of the Arañas?”

“No.”

“That was our gang, the Spiders. We had one rule and one rule only, and all the Crips and Bloods knew what it was: Anything they did to one of us, we did to ten of them. If a cannibal got caught in the wrong apartment building, he got a free flight off the roof.”

“You look a little hyper.”

“I consider myself pretty mellow.”

“You get into it with somebody?”

“No. Why you asking?”

“Because you’re agitated and because I saw something outside.”

“Where you come from, people talk in code?”

She finished her beer and stared into space as though coming to a decision. “I don’t like to mind other people’s business, but you seem like a nice guy. That’s your Harley in back, right?”

“What about it?” he said.

“When I walked past the alley, there was a guy out there.”

“Which guy? What are you talking about?”

“A guy. He was dressed like a cowboy.”

“What was he doing?”

“Looking at your hog.”

“Who cares?”

“He squatted down like he was examining the engine, like it was his hog.”

“Did this guy look like he’s part white, part Indian? Or more like a white Indian?”

“His Wranglers were splitting on his ass. He was wearing a straw cowboy hat. A white Indian?”

“He had a limp, maybe?”

“I didn’t stick around to see. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything.”

“You wait here.”

“I didn’t get that.”

“Wait here. I’ll be back.”

“How about it on the attitude?”

“I want to buy you a drink or dinner. Don’t go anywhere. That’s all I was saying, for Christ’s sake.”

Tony Zappa went out the back and returned in under five minutes. He was grinning and obviously feeling good and ready to resume the conversation. “No problem. I cranked it up. It’s fine. You had me going there. How about that drink now?”

“No, thanks.”

He seemed to reevaluate, as though he couldn’t free himself of a self-centered fear that had probably governed his thoughts for a lifetime. “One last try. Was there anything different about this guy? Did he have weird-looking eyes, maybe a cut on his head?”

“He looked like a cowboy. I told you. You get into it with somebody?”

“No. There’s a lot of riffraff around these days, that’s all. How about dinner? A nice place, maybe El Cazador if you like Mexican, or Romeo’s if you like Italian?”

There was a beat. “I need to take a shower and change.”

“So shower and change.”

“I’m at a motel on West Broadway.” She gave him the name. “Know where that is?”

“You’re staying there? That’s a shithole.”

“Tell me about it. Room nine. Give me a half hour. If I’m in the shower, the door will be unlocked.”

“You never asked my name.”

“You didn’t ask mine,” she said.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Trouble, with a capital T. You think you can handle it, Spider-Man?”

He slipped on his Ray-Bans. His incisors were white and pointy when he smiled. “I like the way you talk, mama. I promise you the ride of your life. Hey, I’m talking about on my Harley. Jesus, you’re touchy.”