Light of the World

Chapter 24

The morning after Gretchen’s life had been saved by the snowshoe rabbit, she climbed to the top of the ridge and tried to track the man who had mocked and almost killed her. She found broken branches in the undergrowth, skid marks where he probably slid down a trail, and the muddy print of a hiking shoe on a flat rock. Down below, she could see the fenced pasture that Wyatt Dixon rented for his horses. To the south, toward the two-lane that led over Lolo Pass, she could find no sign that anyone had passed through the foliage or rock slides or the damp areas where springs leaked out of the hillside. To the north, there was an escarpment that only a desperate person would try to scale. Where had the man on the ridge gone?

There was another possibility: What if he hadn’t gone anywhere? Maybe he had doubled back on his trail and was hiding in the woods in another cave. There were only two or three houses north of Albert’s ranch, all of them located in a natural cul-de-sac formed by cliffs and steep-sided hills that no one would try to climb in the dark.

She decided to retrace her own tracks and start her search all over again. She began by returning to the place where she had almost been caught in the saw-toothed jaws of the bear trap. The trap and the chain and the steel pin that had anchored it were gone.

She turned in a circle and stared at the dust floating in the shafts of sunlight that shone through the canopy. “You out there, bubba?” she called out. “You had plenty to say last night! Let’s have a chat!”

She heard her voice echo off the hillside.

“You’re not going to let a woman run you off, are you?”

Nothing.

Now it was Tuesday, and she had no evidence to prove that anyone had tried to maim or kill her on the hillside behind Albert’s house. That afternoon, she packed her gym bag and drove to the health club on the highway between Lolo and Missoula, unaware that she was about to face her oldest nemesis, namely, her fear that disobeying her instincts and placing her trust in others would lead invariably to betrayal and manipulation.

She dressed in a pair of sweatpants and a sports bra and running shoes and a Marine Corps utility cap and did three miles on the indoor track, up on the second floor. Then she went into an alcove on the edge of the track and slipped on a pair of gloves with dowels inside them and started in on the heavy bag, hitting it so hard, it bounced on the suspension chain and swung into the wall. After every fourth blow, she twisted her body and delivered a kick to the bag that made such a loud whap that people running on the track turned and stared, almost in alarm.

She pulled off her gloves and wiped her face and neck with a sweat towel, then loaded an audiobook into her iPod and went to work on the speed bag. She started out hitting doubles, two blows with one fist, two blows with the other. After fifteen minutes, she switched to singles, creating a bicycle-like motion, allowing one fist to follow the other without interruption, the bag thundering off the rebound board. All the while, she counted her strokes under her breath, making bare-knuckle contact with the leather sixty times in forty seconds. The bag looked like a black blur thudding off the board.

She went to the water fountain and took a long drink and walked back to the alcove just as a runner came around the bend in the track. The runner was a short woman with very pale skin and black moles on her shoulders. Her hair was thick and sweaty and held a dark luster and streaks of brown. Her face was heated from running, her breath coming short in her chest. She slowed to a stop when she recognized Gretchen. “How do you do?” she said.

Gretchen removed her earbuds and paused her iPod. “I’m fine, Ms. Louviere,” she said.

“I could hear you hitting that bag all the way on the other side of the track. I didn’t know it was you.”

“I come here a couple of days a week,” Gretchen said. To occupy her hands, she rubbed her knuckles and the skinned places along her palms. Down below, she could see a heavyset man named Tim who had been crippled and whose speech had been permanently impaired in a motorcycle accident. He was known for his personal courage and his determination to be self-reliant. He was wheeling himself slowly across the basketball court.

“Would you like to go downstairs and have a glass of iced tea with me?” Felicity asked.

“I have to be somewhere.”

“I don’t blame you for not liking me, Ms. Horowitz. I do blame you for not giving me a chance.”

“Chance to do what?”

“Perhaps to explain some things. To apologize.”

“People are what they do, not what they say.”

“I see.”

“You’re married, Ms. Louviere. That fact won’t go away. My father wakes up every morning with his head in a vise.”

“I’m sorry.”

Gretchen tapped the speed bag with the flat of her fist and watched it swing back and forth on the swivel. “I’d better get back to my workout.”

“What are you listening to?”

“The Big Sky, by A. B. Guthrie.”

“That’s a grand book.”

Gretchen tapped again on the bag, hitting it in a slow rhythm on the second rebound. “Did you see Shane?”

“With Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur and Van Heflin.”

“Guthrie wrote the screenplay. It’s supposed to be the best western ever made. Except it’s not a western, it’s a Judeo-Greek tragedy. Shane doesn’t have a last or first name. He’s just Shane. He comes out of nowhere and never explains his origins. In the last scene, he disappears into a chain of mountains you can hardly see. Brandon deWilde played the little boy who runs after him and keeps shouting Shane’s name because he knows the Messiah has gone away. Nobody ever forgets that scene. I wake up thinking about it in the middle of the night.”

“Where did you learn all this?”

“At the movie theater. You know why the cattle barons in the film hate Shane? It’s because he doesn’t want or need what they have.”

Felicity’s eyes went away from Gretchen’s. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

“No, not at all. How did you know Jean Arthur and Van Heflin costarred with Alan Ladd?”

“I was a ticket taker at an art theater.”

“I’m doing my second documentary. My first one made Sundance. I think I might get enough financing from France to do a period film, an adaptation of a novel about Shiloh.”

“Why go to France for financing?”

“American producers are afraid to risk their money on historical pieces. Did you see Cold Mountain? It was one of the best films ever made about the Civil War, but it bombed. The rest of the world is fascinated with American history. We’re not.” Gretchen tapped the bag. “I’ve got to get back to my workout.”

“You’re an interesting woman, Ms. Horowitz.”

“Who played the role of Jack Wilson, the hired gun?” Gretchen asked.

“Jack Palance,” Felicity said.

“How about Stonewall Torrey, the guy he kills?”

“Elisha Cook, Jr.”

“Did you know that in the scene when Stonewall gets shot, he was harnessed to a cable and jerked backward by an automobile?”

“No, I didn’t know that. I suspect most people don’t.”

“Let go of my old man, Ms. Louviere. He’s a good guy. His problem is, he’s not as tough as he thinks, and he gets hurt real easy.”

“Ask him what he wants to do and then tell me,” Felicity said. “That way, all three of us will know.”

Five minutes later, Gretchen glanced through the window at the health club’s parking lot. The crippled man named Tim had been working his chair down the sloped concrete walkway to the spot where he was picked up each day by a specially equipped vehicle. His hand had slipped on the wheel of his chair, and the chair had spun out of control on the incline and tipped sideways, throwing him on the concrete. No one else was in the parking lot. Felicity Louviere stopped her Audi and left it with the engine running and the driver’s door open while she tried to lift Tim by herself and get him back in the chair. When he fell again, she cradled his head in her lap, both of her knees bleeding, while she waved frantically at the entrance to the building.

Gretchen was no longer thinking about Felicity Louviere. She had figured out a way to put Asa Surrette in a vise. She drove downtown and placed notices in the personal columns of the city newspaper and two independent publications.

I woke at five Wednesday morning. A heavy fog had settled in the trees and on the north and south pastures, and I could hear Albert’s horses blowing inside it. I fell back asleep and dreamed I was in our home on Bayou Teche in New Iberia. It was late fall, and I could see the fog puffing in thick clouds out of the cypress and live oaks and pecan trees and flooded bamboo and elephant ears that grew along the banks. Then I saw myself walking in the mist to the drawbridge at Burke Street and gazing at the long band of amber light that ran down the center of the bayou, all the way to the next drawbridge, the live oaks forming a tunnel that made me think somehow of a birth canal. However, there was nothing celebratory about my perception. The back lawns of the houses along the bayou were blooming with chrysanthemums, not with the flowers of spring, and I could smell gas on the wind and the odor of ponded water and pecan husks and leaves that had yellowed and turned black with mold.

The scene changed, and I saw an image that woke me as though someone had struck me on the cheek. I sat on the side of the mattress, my hands on my knees, my throat dry. I had seen myself enter an old tin boat shed on Bayou Teche, its outside purple with rust, strung with wisps of Spanish moss that had blown off the trees. The wind was rattling the roof and walls of the shed, stressing the metal against the joists. When I stepped inside, the door slammed behind me, and I was surrounded by darkness, left to feel blindly along the walls, the coldness of the water rising into my face. There was no exit anywhere.

Molly put her hand on my back. “Did you have a bad dream?”

“It’s nothing. I’m all right.”

“You called out your mother’s name.”

“I did? She wasn’t in the dream.”

“You said, ‘Alafair Mae Guillory.’ ”

“That was her maiden name. She’d use it when she got mad at my father. She’d say, ‘I’m Alafair Mae Guillory, me.’ ”

“I wish I had known her. She must have been a fine woman.”

“An evil man corrupted her. The things that happened to her later weren’t her fault.”

I went into the bathroom and got dressed. I didn’t want to talk anymore about the dream. I knew what it meant, and I knew why and in what circumstances men cried out for their mothers. “Let’s have breakfast and take Clete fishing,” I said.

“Now?” she said.

“Is there any better time?” I replied.

IT WAS NOT a sentimental act. At a certain age, you realize the greatest loss you can experience is a theft you perpetrate upon yourself — the waste of days given us. Is there any more piercing remorse than the realization that a person has thrown away the potential that resides in every sunrise?

Alafair chose to stay at the house and work on her novel, and Clete and Molly and I drove in my truck to a spot on the Blackfoot River not far from Colonel Lindbergh’s old ranch. It is difficult to describe what the Blackfoot is like, because many of its natural qualities seem to have theological overtones. Maybe that’s why the Indians considered it a holy place. After the spring runoff, the water is blue-green and swift and cold and running in long riffles through boulders that stay half-submerged year round. The canyons are steep-sided and topped with fir and ponderosa and larch trees that turn gold in the fall. If you listen carefully, you notice the rocks under the stream knocking against one another and making a murmuring sound, as though talking to themselves or us.

The boulders along the banks are huge and often baked white and sometimes printed with the scales of hellgrammites. Many of the boulders are flat-topped and are wonderful to walk out on so you can fly-cast and create a wide-looping figure eight over your head and not hang your fly in the trees. Wild roses grow along the banks, as well as bushes and leafy vines that turn orange and scarlet and apricot and plum in the autumn. When the wind comes up the canyon, leaves and pine needles balloon into the air, as though the entirety of the environment is in reality a single organism that creates its own rebirth and obeys its own rules and takes no heed of man’s presence.

The greatest oddity on the river is the quality of light. It doesn’t come from above. There is a mossy green-gold glow that seems to emanate from the table rocks that plate the river bottom, and the trout drifting back and forth in the riffle are backlit by it.

Molly and Clete and I built a fire from driftwood and made cowboy coffee and melted a stick of butter in a skillet and browned ham-and-onion sandwiches that we added strips of cheese and bacon to. After the sun had climbed above the rim of the canyon, the first flies rose from the bushes along the banks and hovered in the spray above the riffle. We waded into water up to our hips and fished a pool behind a beaver dam where both rainbows and cutthroats were hitting anything we threw at them. They hit with the same fervor you see in trout when the first mayflies hatch. They rise quickly out of the shadows, rolling the fly, slapping their tails on the surface, then running with it for the bottom of a pool, your rod arching and throbbing in your palm. All of the worries and concerns that plague us on a daily basis seem to dissolve and disappear, like smoke, inside this sun-spangled canyon deep in the heart of Blackfoot country.

Jim Bridger and Andrew Henry and Will Sublette had been here, and Hugh Glass, who later crawled a hundred miles to the Missouri Breaks after he was mauled by a grizzly on the Milk River, and Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea and the black man named York, who was the delight of the Indians because he could walk on his hands. To me, this was a magical land, watched over by ancient spirits, a reminder of the admonition in Ecclesiastes that the race is not to the swift or the proud and that the earth abideth forever.

We worked our way upstream a half mile from the truck, and while Molly collected rocks, Clete and I began casting on a long blue-green undulating ribbon of trout water bordered on one side by a pebble beach with no brush and, on the other side, a grassy bank full of grasshoppers that fell regularly into the stream and brought the browns and the bulls to the top of the pools.

Clete was ahead of me, his right arm lifting the fly neatly and cleanly from the riffle before it could be pulled under by the current. His hand would stop at twelve o’clock high, and with his wrist, he would create a slow elliptical pattern over his head, drying the fly, filling the air with a swishing sound that was almost musical.

Then I heard his cell phone ring. He reeled in his line and hooked his fly in the cork handle of his rod and waded to shore. I couldn’t hear his conversation over the stream, but I saw the concern in his face and the way he turned his back to me and kept glancing over his shoulder, as though he wanted to conceal the intrusion of the outside world on this perfect stretch of river we had stumbled upon.

That was when I saw something that later seemed too much for coincidence. At least five canine animals were running through the trees on the far bank. At first I thought they were coyotes. But as a rule, coyotes are loners and don’t run in packs. Unlike wolves, they sniff the ground, not the wind, in search of rabbit trails and pocket gophers and chipmunk dens. The canines running through the trees were dark, their ears pointed forward, their heads erect, their tails thick and bushy. The humps on three of them were silver-tipped. I had no doubt they were wolves.

I saw Clete close his phone and put it in his pocket. I walked up on the beach, water squishing out of my tennis shoes. “Was that Gretchen?” I asked.

“How’d you know?”

“The look on your face. You don’t hide your emotions well. Did Surrette come back?”

“The National Transportation Safety Board issued its report on the crash of the Sierra Club plane. There was an explosion inside the cabin. It was probably a bomb.”

“How did it get on the plane?”

“Gretchen said she and the pilot left it parked by a general store on the edge of the Blackfoot rez. The guy who runs the store is a relative of Angel Deer Heart.”

“Gretchen thinks the Indians are involved in blowing up a plane?”

“No, she thinks somebody connected with the Youngers planted the bomb while she and the pilot were taking photographs up the road.”

“Maybe the bomb was put on there earlier,” I said.

“She says the cabin was clean when she got on at Missoula. At least as far as she could tell.”

“How is Gretchen taking it?”

“The pilot was her friend. How do you think she’s taking it?”

“Let’s go back to town,” I said.

“I didn’t mean to sound sharp.”

“We had a good time. Let’s get Molly and head home.”

He looked across the river into the trees. He pointed. “Do you see what I’m seeing?”

“They’re wolves.”

“I never heard of wolves on the Blackfoot. Are they part of that reintroduction program?”

“I don’t know, Clete. I’m not sure about anything anymore.”

We walked back down the river, over rocks that were as white as eggs, the trees ruffling on either side of the canyon. A blue rubber raft full of revelers floated past us, all of them toasting us with their beer cans, their faces happy and pink with sunburn. I wanted never to let go of this place. We walked around a bend and saw Molly coming toward us, her mouth moving, her words lost in the wind. Behind her, I could see my truck parked up on the bench, the sun hammering like a heliograph on the windshield.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I walked down below the bend to collect some pieces of driftwood. I didn’t lock the truck. You’d better look inside.”

“What is it?” I said.

“See for yourself. I didn’t touch anything.”

I took off my fly vest and set it down on the rocks and laid my fly rod on top of it. As I approached the truck, I could see a pair of blue women’s panties hanging from the rearview mirror. There was no movement in the trees, no sign of tire tracks other than mine on the access road, nobody on the bank of the river except Molly and Clete. I opened the passenger door and removed the panties from the mirror. There were specks of dried blood near the elastic band. Clete had been standing behind me. He removed a small pair of binoculars from the canvas rucksack he always carried on fishing trips, and began scanning the woods, then the far bank.

“Maybe it was some college kids playing a prank,” he said. “A bunch of them kayak through here.”

Someone had placed a Montana driver’s license on the dashboard. I picked it up by the edges and looked at the laminated photo of a young woman. She was pretty and seemed pleased to be photographed. There was a bright prospect in her eyes, a glow about her.

“Who’s it belong to?” Clete asked.

“Rhonda Fayhee.”

“Who?”

“The waitress who went missing up by Lookout Pass.”

“That son of a bitch was here?”

“Get Elvis Bisbee on the horn and tell him what we’ve got.”

“Bisbee is a boob. I’d rather deal with Fart, Barf, and Itch. At least they don’t wear mustaches that look like rope.”

“The FBI had twenty years to pinch this guy. It took Wichita PD to do it.”

“How’d he get in and out of here without us seeing him?” he said, punching in a 911 call with his thumb.

I didn’t want to think about the wolves in the trees on the far side of the river or the wolf that was probably living somewhere behind Albert’s house. The theater of the mind was Surrette’s ally. But I had no doubt he had been here and left two of his trophies for us to find. I also felt that he represented a level of evil far greater in dimension and cunning than the machinations of one individual. I have interviewed condemned inmates on death row in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. My experience with each of them was the same. I believed they were not only dysfunctional but irreparably impaired. They were either schizophrenic or had fetal alcohol syndrome or had been neurologically damaged by severe beatings as children. Normality had never been an option in their lives. And there was no theological side to the story.

Surrette was different. Men of his ilk wish to re-create the world in their image. The evil they do is of a kind we never erase from memory. I knew I would never forget the image of the woman’s blood-spotted undergarment hanging from my rearview mirror. Nor would I ever be able to explain how a man could take pride in torturing to death an innocent young woman in the flower of her life. I wanted to confront Surrette and make him accountable, not simply for his crimes but for his existence. I think I know why Himmler and other Nazi war criminals killed themselves. They ensured their own immortality by denying us knowledge of who they really were. If I caught Asa Surrette, I was determined that he would tell us his secrets and his origins, even if the rule book got tossed over the gunwale.

Clete closed his cell phone.

“What did they say?” I asked.

“They’re sending a couple of lab guys out. We shouldn’t touch anything,” he replied. He stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth and gazed across the river. “This one really bothers me, Dave.”

“Join the club.”

Before he spoke again, he checked to see if Molly was within earshot. “When we get this guy, he’s going into a wood chipper. We’re on the same wavelength about this, right?”

“I made a mistake earlier,” I said.

“About what?”

“I should have listened to Wyatt Dixon.”

“Are you crazy?”

“That’s the point. I’m not, and neither are you. Dixon is. He probably sees a netherworld others can’t. This one doesn’t have a zip code, Clete. Surrette is the real deal.”

I thought Clete was going to dismiss me. He didn’t. His face became empty of expression, as though he had lost the thread in our conversation. He leaned over and picked up a handful of rocks and began throwing them in the river, watching them make big plopping holes in the riffle. Then he said, “If I get back to New Orleans, I’m never going to leave.”

Gretchen’s notice in the personals read:

“How’d you think up something like this?” Clete said when she told him what she had done.

“All predators troll. Even when they’re inactive or in prison, they troll.”

“That’s not the issue.”

“He let Alafair interview him in prison because he thought she was going to write a book about him. He took creative writing courses at Wichita State and wrote a novel based on himself. He thinks he’s an intellectual and a great artist.”

“You should have talked to me first.”

“I need approval?” she said.

“The guy tried to kill you with a bear trap. Your life was saved by a rabbit.”

“I get you. I’m so inept, I’d be dead except for the intervention of an animal.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.”

“Surrette is a narcissist, Clete. Believe me, he’ll swallow the bait. Hollywood is a drug. Its sharpest critics are fascinated by it. Otherwise they wouldn’t be talking about it all the time.”

“He outsmarted the cops for twenty years, Gretchen. He survived a collision with a gas truck. Dave thinks Surrette may come from somewhere else. He didn’t say it exactly that way, but that’s what he’s thinking.”

“How about taking the mashed potatoes out of your mouth?”

“Years back we went up against a guy named Legion Guidry. He was an overseer on a plantation in Iberia Parish.” Clete shook his head as though deciding whether he should revisit the experience. “I think maybe this guy wasn’t human. I try to forget about him. I get the heebie-jeebies when I start thinking too much about stuff like that.”

They were sitting on the front porch of the cabin. It was Friday, the beginning of a fine weekend, and Gretchen could see the mist from the sprinklers in Albert’s yard blowing on the flower beds and the patches of clover in the fescue. It was the kind of summer day that lacked only the smell of mowed grass to be perfect. “What stuff?” she said.

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Don’t leave me hanging like this.”

“Dave believed Legion Guidry worked for the devil. I didn’t want to hear it. I grew up listening to stuff like that. But Dave and I never could explain a lot of the things Guidry did or the power he seemed to have over people.”

“You guys got him, right? Doesn’t that tell you something? He was flesh and blood.”

“It wasn’t us. He was hit by lightning. He ran into a swamp with bullets flying around him. Then lightning hit the woods. The coroner and some deputies found his body floating in a bay with a bunch of dead pigs.”

Clete had been drinking a can of warm beer. He picked it up, then looked at it as though he didn’t know where it had come from. He set it back down and stared into space.

“Are you all right?” she said.

“Yeah, I’m fine. I don’t like to go inside my own head sometimes.”

“Wichita PD nailed Surrette,” she said. “He wasn’t the criminal genius of the century.”

“He sent them a floppy disk that could be traced to his employer’s computer. He made the disk on a Saturday, when no one else was in the office. I think he deliberately screwed up.”

“What for?”

“He wasn’t getting enough attention. He wanted to stand up in court, in front of the families, and describe in detail what he did to his victims. He was happier than a hog rolling in shit.”

“Both you and Dave are letting this guy get to you. There’s one way you deal with a guy like Surrette. You put more holes in him than he can put plugs in. It’s that simple.” He turned in his chair. She saw the sadness in his eyes. “Don’t look at me that way,” she said.

“That’s the stuff shank artists in the joint say,” he replied. “You get that kind of language out of your vocabulary.”

“What I’m saying is the guy’s no supervillain. He’s not from the Abyss,” she said. “You’ve been around the worst of the worst. You know they all go down.”

“I took money from the Giacanos and worked for Sally Dee. They were bad guys, but they didn’t come close to Legion Guidry. This is what you’re choosing not to hear. Dave is right about Surrette. How does he come and go on Albert’s property? How’d he disappear after he almost killed you with a bear trap?”

“Are we working together or not?” she asked.

“I’ll always back your play. You know that.”

“Sometimes I’m not sure.”

“Don’t ever say that to me again,” he said.

“Why do you talk to me like that?”

“Because sometimes I feel like it.”

“You really know how to treat a girl, Clete. Fuck you,” she said.