Light of the World

Chapter 2

The allure of Montana is like a commitment to a narcotic; you can never use it up or get enough of it. Its wilderness areas probably resemble the earth on the first day of creation. For me it was also a carousel, one whose song and light show never ended. The morning after Alafair’s confrontation with Wyatt Dixon, we had rain, then blowing snow inside the sunshine, then sleeting snow and rain, and sunshine again and green pastures and flowers blooming in the gardens and a rainbow that arched across the mountains. All of this before nine A.M.

I walked down through the pasture, past Albert’s four-stall barn, to the cabin made of split logs where Clete Purcel was staying. The cabin had been built next to a streambed shaded by cottonwoods and a solitary birch tree. The streambed carried water only in the spring and was dry and sandy the rest of the year, crisscrossed by the tracks of deer and wild turkeys and sometimes the long-footed imprints of snowshoe rabbits.

Clete’s hip waders were hanging upside down from the gallery roof, rainwater slipping down their rubbery surfaces; his fly and spinning rods were propped against the gallery railing, the lines pulled tightly through the eyelets and doubled back along the length of the rods, the hooks on the lures notched into the cork handles. He had washed his canvas creel and fishnet in a bucket and had hung them and his canvas fly vest on pegs that protruded from the log wall. His restored maroon Cadillac convertible was parked behind the cabin, a tarp draped over its starched white top, the tarp speckled with the droppings of ravens and magpies.

Through the window, I could see him eating at the breakfast table, his massive upper body hunched over his food, the grate on the woodstove behind him slitted with fire. Before I could knock, he waved me in.

If space aliens ever wanted to take over the planet and wipe out the human race, they simply needed to convince the rest of us to eat the same breakfast that Clete Purcel did. With variations depending on the greasy spoon, he daily shoveled down the pipe a waffle or three pancakes soaked in syrup, or four eggs fried in butter, with toast, grits, and a bowl of milk gravy on the side; a pork chop or breakfast steak or a plate of ham and bacon; and at least three cups of café au lait. Because he knew he had filled his digestive system with enough cholesterol and salt to clog the Suez Canal, he topped it off with a cup of stewed tomatoes or fruit cocktail, in the belief that it could neutralize a combination of grease and butter and animal fat with the viscosity of the lubricant used on train wheels.

I told him about Alafair’s encounter with Wyatt Dixon and our exchange with him at the casino. Clete opened the grate to his stove and dropped two blocks of pinewood into the flames. “Dixon allowed the deputy to search his truck?” he said.

“He was completely cooperative. The only weapon in there was an old lever-action Winchester.”

“Maybe he’s not the guy.”

“Alafair says nobody else was in the parking area or on the ridge. She’s sure Dixon is the only person who could have shot the arrow.”

“You think he has a jacket?”

“I called the sheriff an hour ago. Dixon has been around here for years, but nobody is sure what he is or who he is. He was mixed up with some militia people in the Bitterroot Valley who were afraid of him. When he went down for capping a rapist, Deer Lodge couldn’t deal with him.”

“A prison in Montana can’t deal with somebody?”

“They sent him to electroshock.”

“I didn’t think they did that anymore.”

“They made an exception. Dixon was kicked out of the army when he was fifteen for cutting the stripes off a black mess sergeant behind a saloon in San Antonio and stuffing them in the guy’s mouth. At a rodeo he knocked a bull unconscious with his fist. He says he’s born-again, and some people say he can speak in tongues. A university professor was recording a Pentecostal prayer meeting up on the rez when Wyatt Dixon got up and started testifying. The university professor claims Dixon was speaking Aramaic.”

“What’s Aramaic?”

“The language of Jesus.”

Clete was looking at his coffee cup, his expression neutral, his little-boy haircut freshly combed and damp from his shower, his face unlined and youthful in the morning sunlight. “Dave, don’t get mad at me for what I’m about to say. But we got the living shit shot out of us on the bayou. Not once but twice. Alafair went through a big trauma, just like us. I shut my eyes and I imagine things.”

“Alafair’s ear was cut.”

“We don’t know that the arrow did it. You said something about ravens fighting in a tree. Maybe it’s all coincidence. Easy does it, right?”

“Alafair is nobody’s fool. She doesn’t go around imagining things.”

“She gets into it with people. This time it’s with a wack job. The guy’s truck was clean. Leave him alone and quit borrowing trouble.”

“Do you know what I feel when you say something like that?” I asked.

“No, what?”

“Forget it. Have a few more slices of ham. Maybe that will help you think more clearly.”

He blew out his breath. “You want to roust him?”

“He doesn’t roust.”

“You said he went down on a murder beef. How’d he get out?”

“A technicality of some kind.”

“Okay, we’ll keep an eye out, but the guy has no reason to hurt Alafair. And he doesn’t add up as a guy who randomly hunts people with a bow and arrow, particularly on his home turf.”

Clete was the best investigative cop I ever knew and hard to argue with. He would lay down his life for me and Alafair and Molly. He was brave and gentle and violent and self-destructive, and each morning he woke with a succubus that had fed at his heart since childhood. Whenever I spoke impatiently to him or hurt his feelings, I felt an unrelieved sense of remorse and sorrow, because I knew that Clete Purcel was one of those guys who took the heat for the rest of us. I also knew that if he were not in our midst, the world would be a much worse place.

“I guess I worry too much,” I said.

“Alafair is your daughter. You’re supposed to worry, noble mon,” he said. “I still got some buttered toast in the skillet. Eat up.”

I knew he was kidding about the buttered toast, and I hoped that our vacation was on track and that my worries about Alafair and Wyatt Dixon were unfounded. But when he poured a cup of coffee in a tin cup and pushed it across the table toward me, his green eyes not meeting mine, I knew he was thinking about something else, not about a quasi-psychotic cowboy in a casino. I also knew that whenever Clete Purcel tried to hide something, both of us were headed for trouble.

“Go ahead,” I said.

“Go ahead what?”

“Say whatever it is that’s bothering you.”

“I was just going to update you, that’s all.”

“About what?”

“Gretchen just graduated from that film school in Los Angeles.”

“Good,” I replied, my discomfort increasing.

“She called and said she’d like to visit.”

“Here?”

“Yeah, since here is where I’m staying, this is where she’d like to visit. I already talked with Albert.”

I tried to keep my eyes flat, my face empty, to clear the obstruction that was like a wishbone in my throat. He was staring into my face, expectant, wanting me to say words I couldn’t.

Less than a year before, Clete discovered he had fathered a daughter out of wedlock. Her name was Gretchen Horowitz, and she had been raised in Miami by her mother, a heroin addict and a prostitute. He also found out that Gretchen had been a contract assassin for the Mafia and was known in the life as Caruso.

“Think she’ll like Montana?” I said.

“Why wouldn’t she?”

“It’s cold country. I mean cold for a kid who grew up in the tropics.”

I saw the light die in his eyes. “Sometimes you really get to me, Streak.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry is right,” he said. He picked up his dishes and dropped them loudly in the sink.

Six months ago, close to the Colorado-Kansas line, a little boy looked out the window of a house trailer not far from the intersection of a two-lane highway and a dirt road. The sky was lidded with black thunderclouds, the western rim of the landscape banded by a ribbon of cold blue light. The wind was blowing hard in the fields, lifting clouds of grit into the air, flapping the wash on the clotheslines behind the trailer. Even though the land was carpeted by miles and miles of wheat that was planted in the fall and harvested in the spring, the coldness of the season and the bitter edge in the elements made one feel this part of the world was condemned to permanent winter. It was the locale where the term “cabin fever” originated, where farm women went crazy in January and shot themselves, and a rancher had to tie a rope from the porch to the barn to find his way back to the house during a whiteout. It was a place where only the most religious and determined of people survived.

While the little boy’s mother slept in front of a television screen buzzing with white noise, the boy watched a tattered man emerge from a beer joint at the crossroads and walk unsteadily down the edge of the two-lane, one hand clamped to the hat on his head, his coat whipping in the wind, his face leaning like a hatchet into the flying snow pellets that were as tiny and hard as bits of glass. Later, the boy would refer to the figure as “the scarecrow man.”

A tanker truck appeared far down the wavy surface of the highway, headlights on, its weight and shimmering cylindrical shape and dedicated purpose so great and unrelenting that it seemed to move and jitter against the sun’s afterglow without sound or mechanically driven power, sustained by its own momentum, as though the truck had a destiny that had been planned long ago.

From the opposite direction, a prison van with a driver and a guard in front was approaching the crossroads. The van was followed by an escort cruiser that had stopped so one of the state police officers could use the restroom. In the back of the van was a prisoner by the name of Asa Surrette, who was scheduled to testify at a murder trial in a small town on the Colorado border. His left arm had been broken by another inmate in a maximum-security unit at El Dorado, Kansas. The cast on his arm was thick and cumbersome and ran from wrist to shoulder. Because of the prisoner’s history of docility in custody, his warders had not put him in a waist chain but instead had manacled his right hand to a D-ring inset in the floor, which allowed him to lie back on a perforated steel bench welded to the van wall.

The little boy saw the scarecrow man take a flat-sided amber bottle from his coat pocket and upend it against the sky, then screw down the cap and, for no apparent reason, stumble across the highway in front of the tanker truck. The boy began to make moaning sounds against the window glass. The driver of the truck hit the brakes, jackknifing the load. The tanker swung sideways across the asphalt, and the air filled with the screeching sound of torn steel, like a ship breaking apart as it sank.

The driver of the prison van probably never had a chance to react. The van crashed with such force into the truck cab that it seemed to disintegrate as the tanker rolled over it. The moment of ignition was not instantaneous. Debris rained down on the asphalt and in the ditches along the road, while a dark apron of gasoline spread from the spot where the tanker came to rest. There was a flash of light from the far side of the truck cab, followed by an explosion and a yellow-and-red ball of flame that boiled the frozen snow in the fields. The two vehicles were still burning when the volunteer fire truck arrived half an hour later.

The little boy told his mother what he had seen, and she in turn told the authorities. If a scarecrow man was the cause of the accident, there was no trace of him. Nor did anybody in the beer joint remember a drunk who had wandered down the road, perhaps with a bottle of whiskey.

An investigation resulted in the following conclusions: The two state police officers in the escort vehicle were derelict in not staying within sight of the prison van; the driver of the tanker truck should have been on the interstate but had taken a detour to visit a girlfriend; the driver of the van and the guard in the passenger seat had probably died upon impact; the little boy who had seen the scarecrow man had been diagnosed as autistic and was considered by his teachers as fanciful and uneducable in a conventional setting.

Four people were dead, the bodies burned so badly that they virtually crumbled apart when the paramedics tried to extract them from the wreckage. The centerpiece of the news story was neither the macabre nature of the accident nor the loss of innocent life but the death of the prisoner. Asa Surrette had stalked and tortured and killed eight people, including children, in the city of Wichita, and had eluded execution because the crimes to which he’d confessed had been committed before 1994, when the maximum sentence in Kansas for homicide was life imprisonment.

The news of his death went out over the wire services and was soon consigned to the category of good riddance and forgotten. Also forgotten was the account given by the autistic boy whose breath had fogged the window just before the scarecrow man silhouetted against the truck’s headlights. But historical footnotes are tedious and uninteresting. Why should the little boy’s tale be treated any differently?

I didn’t want to be unfair to Gretchen. Her childhood had been one of neglect and abuse. No, that’s not quite accurate. Her childhood had been horrific. Her body was burned with cigarettes when she was an infant. Many years later, Clete Purcel caught up with the man who did it, out on the flats, on the backside of Key West. Later, a man’s skin and most of his bones washed out of a sandbar, a Bic cigarette lighter wedged in what was left of the thorax.

At age six, Gretchen was sodomized by her mother’s boyfriend, a psychopath named Bix Golightly who did smash-and-grab jewel-store robberies and fenced the loot through the Dixie Mafia. Last year Gretchen took a pro bono contract on Golightly and found him sitting in his van at night in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans; she planted three rounds in his face. Clete saw it happen and called in a shots-fired but protected his daughter’s identity. His love for the daughter and his attempts at atonement almost cost him his life.

I liked Gretchen. She had many of her father’s virtues. There was no doubt that she was fearless. There was no doubt she was intelligent. I also believed that her contrition for her former life was real. However, there is a peculiar atavistic mechanism built into each of us that doesn’t always coincide with our thought processes. A tuning fork buried in the human breast develops a tremolo when we come in contact with certain kinds of people. Ask any career cop about former felons of his acquaintance who have stacked serious time in a maximum-security joint and were stand-up and took everything the system and the prison culture could throw at them and came out of it fairly intact and went to work as carpenters and welders and married decent women and started families. Every good cop is glad to witness that kind of success story. But when one of those same guys moves next door to you, or asks to come by your house, or introduces himself to your wife and children in the grocery store, a film projector clicks on in your head and you see images from this man’s past that you cannot stop thinking about. As a consequence, you create an invisible moat around your castle and loved ones and subtly indicate that it is not to be crossed by the wrong people, no matter how unfair that might seem.

I was helping Albert scrub out the horse tank in the south pasture when I saw Gretchen’s chopped-down hot-rod pickup coming up the dirt road from the state highway, the soft-throated rumble of the twin Hollywood mufflers echoing off the hillsides. “Albert?” I said.

“What?” he replied, obviously irritated that I had chosen to use his name as a question rather than simply ask him the question. His denim sleeves were rolled up on his arms, the exposed skin sprinkled with purple-and-blackish-brown discolorations that he refused to see a dermatologist about. Few of his university colleagues ever knew that Albert had been a drifter and roustabout and migrant farmworker at age seventeen and had done six months spreading tar on a Florida road gang. The greatest contradiction about Albert lay in the antithetical mix of his egalitarian social views and work-hardened physicality with his patrician features and Southern manners, as though his creator had decided to install the soul of Sidney Lanier in the body of a hod carrier.

“Did Clete tell you very much about Miss Gretchen?” I asked.

“He said she was planning to make a documentary on shale-oil extraction.”

“Did he tell you about her background?”

“He said she just finished film school.”

“She got mixed up with some bad dudes in Miami.”

He was bent over the rim of the tank, scrubbing a ring of dried red bacteria off its sides. I could hear him breathing above the sound of the bristles scraping against the aluminum. “What kind of bad dudes are we talking about?”

“Greaseballs from Brooklyn and Staten Island. Maybe some Cuban hitters in Little Havana.”

He nodded, still moving the brush back and forth. “I never liked the term ‘greaseballs.’ I know you use it to characterize a state of mind and not ethnicity. Just the same, I don’t like it.”

“Forget political correctness. She did contract hits, Albert.”

This time he stopped working. He was crouched on his knees, one arm resting on the lip of the tank. “Why isn’t she in jail?”

“Clete and I looked the other way. I don’t always feel real good about that.”

“Is she mobbed up now?”

“No, she’s done with it.”

He watched Gretchen’s hot rod come up the dirt road, the horses running beside it along the rail fence. “I had chains on my ankles when I was eighteen. I watched two hacks put a man on an anthill. I saw a boy locked in a corrugated tin sweatbox that almost cooked his brain. I was in a parish prison in Louisiana when a man was electrocuted twenty feet from the lockdown unit I was in. I could hear him weeping when they strapped him down.”

“I had to inform you, Albert.”

“Yeah, I know. If you were me, what would you do?”

I had to collect my thoughts before I spoke. “I’d ask her to leave.”

“Going to Mass this Sunday?” he said.

“You know how to rub the salt in the wound.”

He began hosing off the inside of the tank, tilting it sideways to force the water through the drain hole in the bottom. “We didn’t have this conversation.”

“Sir?”

He glanced at the sky. “It looks like more rain. We can use as much as we can get. Those goddamn oil companies are cooking the whole planet.”

I resolved that one day I would ask Albert why his colleagues at the university had not shot him long ago.

Gretchen turned off the dirt road and drove under the arch above Albert’s driveway and parked in front of the house. She walked across the front lawn, past the flower baskets hanging from the deck, and stopped at the pedestrian gate to the pasture where we were cleaning and refilling the horse tank. She had reddish-blond hair and Clete’s clear complexion and eyes that were the color of violets and the same erect posture that made both her and Clete look taller than they were. Also like her father, she was bold and irreverent but could not be called bitter or unduly aggressive. There’s a serious caveat to that. Like most individuals who have been abandoned and left to suffer at the hands of predators, Gretchen viewed the world with suspicion, analyzed every word in a conversation, considered all promises suspect, and sent storm warnings to anyone who tried to impose his way on her.

Her skin was deeply tanned, her gold neck chain and Star of David exposed on her chest, the sun shining on her hair. “I wasn’t sure if I should drive down to the cabin or turn in to the drive,” she said.

“Hello, Gretchen,” I said, feeling both awkward and hypocritical. “This is Albert Hollister. He’s our host.”

“Welcome to Lolo, Montana, Ms. Horowitz,” he said. “We like to say we’re very humble in Lolo.”

“What a wonderful place you have,” she replied. “Do you own the whole valley?”

“Plum Creek owns the crown of the hill behind the house, but the rest is mine.”

She gazed at the arroyo that ran from Albert’s improvised gun range up to an unused logging road that traversed the top of the hill and disappeared inside stands of Douglas fir that were as fat as Christmas trees. “I saw a man up there. He must be a logger,” she said.

“No, Plum Creek doesn’t log up there anymore. They’re selling everything off,” Albert said.

“I saw a guy on that log road. He looked right at me,” she said. “He was wearing a slicker with a hood. It must be wet up there.”

“Did you see his face?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Having trouble with the neighbors?”

“Alafair thinks a guy farther down the ridge shot an arrow at her,” I said.

“Why would someone do that?”

“We don’t know,” I said. I put my hands in my back pockets and gazed at the ground. I felt deceitful and totally lacking in charity toward someone who’d had a horrible childhood imposed upon her. I wished I had said nothing to Albert about Gretchen’s background. “I’m glad you’re here.”

She stared at the blue-green roll of the mountains to the south. When her eyes came back to mine, she was smiling, her cheeks full of color. The sun was bright on her face and hair and her gold chain and the tops of her breasts. She looked as though she had been caught in a camera’s lens during a moment when she could only be described as absolutely stunning. “I appreciate that, Dave, more than you can know. Thanks for inviting me, Mr. Hollister,” she said.

I couldn’t remember when I had felt so small.

I went into the kitchen, where my wife, Molly, was slicing tomatoes on a breadboard. “Gretchen Horowitz is here,” I said.

The knife slowed and stopped. “Oh,” she said.

“I told Albert of her background. I told him maybe it would be better if Gretchen moved on. I actually told him to say that to her.”

“Don’t give yourself too much credit, Streak. Albert has two ways of doing things. There’s Albert’s way. Then there’s Albert’s way.”

Molly had the shoulders and hands of a countrywoman, and an Irish mouth and heavy arms and white skin dusted with sun freckles. Her hair was a dull red and silver on the roots; though she kept it cut short, it had a way of falling in her eyes when she worked. She was my moral compass, my navigator, my partner in everything, braver than I, more compassionate, more steadfast when the storm clouds started rolling. She had been a nun who never took vows; she worked with the Maryknolls in El Salvador and Guatemala during a time when Maryknoll women were raped and killed and the administration in Washington looked the other way. Former Sister Molly Boyle should have been running the Vatican, at least in my view.

She looked through the window at the horses grazing down the slope in the shade, their tails slashing at the insects that were starting to rise from the grass as the day warmed. I knew she was thinking about Gretchen and the violence we thought we had left behind in Louisiana.

“Gretchen saw a man looking at her from the hillside,” I said. “Albert says there’s no reason for anybody to be up there.”

“You think it’s the rodeo guy Alafair had trouble with?”

“I’m going to take a walk up there now.”

“I’ll come along.”

“There’s no need for you to. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

She wiped her hands on a dish towel. “My foot,” she said.

We climbed up the trail behind the house, through pine and fir and larch trees widely spaced in an arroyo that stayed in deep shade most of the day. At the top of the trail was the old Plum Creek logging road, shaped like a horseshoe and partially eroded and caved in and dotted with seedlings and heaped in places with piles of barkless and worm-eaten trees that had slid down from the bluff during the spring melt. The incline at the top of the trail was steep, and I was perspiring and breathing harder than I wanted to admit when we gained the road near the ridge. The wind was cold on my face, the sun shining through the canopy like shafts of light in a cathedral, my head reeling. When I looked back down at the valley, Albert’s three-story house looked like it had been miniaturized.

“You okay, skipper?” Molly said.

“I’m fine,” I said, my heart pounding. I looked in both directions on the road. I expected to see oil and brake fluid cans and lunch trash left behind by loggers, but the road was clean and the slopes below it carpeted with pine needles, the outcroppings of rock gray and striated by erosion and spotted with bird droppings.

It was an idyllic scene, one that seemed to have healed itself after years of clear-cutting and neglect. It was one of the moments when you feel that indeed the earth abideth forever, and that all the industrial abuse we’ve done to it will somehow disappear with time.

At the place where the logging road dead-ended in a huge pile of dirt and burned tree stumps, I saw the sunlight flash on a metallic surface. “Stay behind me,” I said.

“What is it?” Molly asked.

“Probably nothing.”

I walked ahead of her along the base of the bluff, through a low spot in the road where the soil was dark from the morning rain and marked by the tracks of someone wearing needle-nosed cowboy boots. The tracks were deep and sharp-edged and beaded with moisture in the center, as though the soil under the boot had been compressed only minutes earlier. Farther on, lying in the dirt next to a round boulder, were an empty potted-meat can, broken pieces of saltine crackers, and a spray of what looked like fingernail clippings.

There was no movement in the trees, no sound anywhere, not even a pinecone rolling down the hillside. A line of sweat ran from my armpit down my side. Below, I saw the wind bend the grass in Albert’s pasture, then climb the hillside and sway the canopy against the sun.

“Good God, what’s that smell?” Molly said.

I walked another ten yards up the road and held up my hand for her to stop. “Don’t come any farther,” I said.

“Tell me what it is.”

“It’s disgusting. Stay back.”

Someone had defecated in the middle of the road and made no attempt to dig a hole or cover it up. Horseflies were swarming on the spot. Up above, behind a cluster of bushes, was an opening to a cave. I picked up a rock the size of a baseball and chunked it through the brush and heard it strike stone. “Come on out here, podna,” I said.

There was only quiet. I threw a second and then a third rock with the same result. I grabbed hold of a tree trunk and pulled myself up on the slope and walked toward the cave, the ground spongy with rainwater and pine needles. I could hear Molly climbing the slope behind me. I turned and tried to signal her to stop. But that was not the way of Molly Boyle and never would be.

“Hey, buddy, we’re not your enemies,” I said. “We just want to know who you are. We’re not going to call the cops on you.”

This time when I spoke, I was close enough to the cave to create an echo and feel the cool air and smell the bat guano and pooled water inside. I took a penlight from my pocket and stepped under the overhang and shined the light on the back wall. I could see the dried skin of an animal on the floor, ribs poking through the fur, eye sockets empty.

“What’s in there?” Molly said.

“A dead mountain lion. It probably got hurt or shot and went in here to die.”

“You don’t think a homeless person has been living there?”

“We’re too far from the highway. I think the rodeo clown came back and was watching the house.”

“Let’s get out of here, Dave.”

I turned to leave the cave; then, as an afterthought, I shone the penlight along the walls and ledges. The surface of the stone was soft with mold and lichen and bat droppings and water seepage from the surface. Close to the ceiling was a series of gashes in the lichen, a perfect canvas on which a throwback from an earlier time could leave his message. I suspected he had used a sharp stone for a stylus, trenching the letters as deep as possible, cutting through the lichen into the wall, as though savoring the alarm and injury and fear his words would inflict upon others.

I was here but you did not know me. Before there was an alpha and omega I was here. I am the one before whom every knee shall bend.

“Who is this guy?” Molly said.