Light of the World

Chapter 30

From the moment Felicity Louviere stole Gretchen Horowitz’s cell phone, she knew that her life had changed and that she would never be the same again. She also knew that nothing from her past life could possibly prepare her for the ordeal that lay ahead. As she drove away from the health club, there was a well of fear in her breast that seemed to have no bottom. At the red light, she looked at the impassive faces of the drivers in other cars, as though these strangers, whom she never would have noticed under ordinary circumstances, might know an alternative to her situation and somehow remove her from the scorched ruins that her life had become.

Her hands were small and powerless and without sensation on the steering wheel. She felt that a poisonous vapor had invaded her chest and attacked her organs and that nothing short of death was worse than living in her current state of mind. She drove through town, barely aware of the traffic around her, going through a yellow light without seeing it, ending up in a park on the north side of Missoula, not sure how she got there.

She turned off her engine down by the creek, in the shade of trees, and didn’t pick up calls. The creek was as clear as glass and rippling over rocks that were orange and green and gray-blue, but she could take no pleasure in the pastoral quality of the scene. She had never felt more alone in her life, except on the day when she realized her father had abandoned her to seek martyrdom in a South American jungle. For the first time since she last saw him, she understood the burden he must have carried to his death. The guilt over the killing of the Indians by the men he worked with must have been so great, he could have no peace until he atoned for them and himself. He did this, she was sure, in order to be the father he wanted his daughter to have.

She had never thought about her father in that way. That he’d chosen to travel the path up to Golgotha’s summit on her account.

Gray spots, like motes of dust, were swimming before her eyes. She opened the windows to let fresh air in the car and was surprised at how cold the weather had turned, even though the equinox was at hand. She got out and saw snow flurries spinning in the sunlight, sparkling in the branches of the trees that lined the stream. Her stomach was sick, her skin clammy; she could not remember when she had felt this light-headed. When she closed her eyes, the earth seemed to tilt under her feet. Gretchen’s cell phone vibrated on the dashboard. She reached back in the car and looked at the screen. The call was blocked.

“Hello?” she said.

“Who’s this?” a man’s voice said.

“If you called for Gretchen Horowitz, she’s not available.”

“So I’ll talk to you. What’s your name?”

“Felicity Louviere.”

There was a pause. “Caspian Younger’s wife?”

“Yes.”

“This is a surprise.”

“You’re Asa Surrette?”

“Surrette is dead. Burned up in a big puff of smoke. That’s what the state police in Kansas say.”

“You were photographing me.”

“I’m casting a movie. You might be in it. Where’s Gretchen?”

“Gone away.”

“To a bar mitzvah?”

“I don’t know where she went.”

“The weather has taken quite a turn. The snow is falling on the creek while the sun is shining. It looks like cotton floating on the water, doesn’t it? Maybe the devil is beating his wife.”

She turned in a circle, her heart pounding. She saw no one. On the far side of the creek, an SUV was parked by a picnic shelter. No one seemed to be inside it. The SUV was either painted with primer or it was black and powdered with white dust. “Is the girl alive?” she said.

“Who?”

“The waitress.”

“Could be. I can check. Want me to do that and call you back?”

“I want to take her place.”

“You’re a bag of tricks, aren’t you?”

“I can see you,” she lied.

“What?”

“You heard me.”

“If we get together, I might have to wash out your mouth with soap.”

“Are you afraid of me?”

“Of you? How silly.”

“You murdered my daughter. Are you afraid to look me in the face and admit that? Are you the frightened little man the authorities say you are?”

“The authorities? What are the authorities? Stupid and uneducated people who would be on welfare if they didn’t have uniforms. Maybe you should watch what you say.”

Her knees felt weak. She sat down behind the steering wheel, the door open, the wind like a cold burn on her brow. She could hear herself breathing inside the confines of the car. “Is the girl hurt badly? What have you done to her?”

“Maybe I’m a kinder man than you think. Maybe I have a side that others don’t know about. You think you’re going to set me up?”

“I don’t want to live,” she said.

“Say that again.”

“You’ll be doing me a favor if you take my life. But you’re not up to it. You’re what they say you are.”

“What do they say?”

“You were in a foster home. There was a room where someone was kept locked up. Or where the children were forced to go when they were bad. What happened in that room? Were you sodomized? Did you have to kneel all night on grains of rice? Were you told you were unclean and unacceptable in the eyes of God? My mother was declared insane. Maybe I can understand what happened to you as a child.”

“Somebody put that on the Internet. It’s a lie. Those things never happened,” he said.

“Then why are you so afraid of me? Did you plan to kill me from afar?”

“Who says I was planning any such thing?”

“I think my husband paid you to kill my daughter. That means I was next.”

“Your husband does what I tell him. Don’t provoke me.” His voice sharpened. “Believe me, you do not want to provoke me, you little bitch.”

“I saw the pictures of the people you suffocated.”

“You want that for yourself? I can arrange it. I would love to do that for you.”

“I think you’re all talk. I think you’re scum. Call me back when you can speak in an intelligent manner.”

He was starting to shout when she closed the phone.

A moment later, she saw someone enter the SUV through the passenger side and drive away, scouring divots of grass out of the lawn, the exhaust trailing off like pieces of dirty string.

An hour later, at the Younger compound on the promontory above the Clark Fork, the cell phone Felicity had taken from Gretchen’s purse vibrated on top of her dresser. She picked it up and placed it to her ear. The French doors on the balcony were open, and she could see the pink and blue blooms on the hydrangeas by the carriage house. She thought of New Orleans and the Garden District and the way the tenderest of flowers opened in the shade, as though defying the coming of the night or the passing of the season. “Did you mean what you said?” the voice asked.

“Yes,” she replied.

“Wait on my instructions. Tell no one about our conversation. If you do, I’ll put Rhonda’s tit in a wringer and let you listen. You’ll never get those sounds out of your head. You still there?”

“Yes,” she said.

“We’ll see if you’re up to this. Have a nice day.”

After he hung up, Felicity sat down slowly in a chair, as though afraid that something inside her would break. Then she began to weep. When she looked up, her husband was standing in the doorway, blocking out the sunlight, his face veiled with shadow. He was eating a bowl of ice cream mixed with pineapple syrup and appeared to be savoring the cold before he swallowed each spoonful. “PMS time again?” he said. “That stands for ‘piss, moan, and snivel.’ ”

“You did it, didn’t you?”

“Did what?”

“Paid Surrette to kill Angel.”

“Your mother was crazy. So are you.”

“Why did you do it, Caspian?”

“I didn’t pay anybody to do anything. I’ve been trafficking in cocaine. Large amounts of it.”

“What?”

“I quit going to G.A. and put my toe back in the water. I dropped a half mil in Vegas alone. The vig was two points a week. I hooked up with some guys in Mexico City. They stiffed me on the deal.”

“So you had Angel murdered?”

“I didn’t.”

“What are you telling me? You make no sense.”

He walked to the French doors and gazed out at the lawn and the potted citrus and bottlebrush trees on the terrace and the roll of the mountains in the distance. “When I first saw you at the art theater, I thought you were the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. What happened to us, Felicity?”

“Nothing,” she replied. “People don’t change. They grow into what they always were.”

At six that evening, Clete came up to Albert’s house and knocked on the front door with the flat of his fist. Albert got up from the dining table and opened the door. “Is this a raid?” he asked.

Clete’s face was flushed, as though he had been out in the sun or drinking all afternoon. “Where’s Dave?”

“Eating,” Albert replied.

“Can I come in?”

“You’re not going to start a fistfight, are you?” Albert said.

“What are you talking about?” Clete said.

“You look like somebody put a burr under your blanket,” Albert said. “You want a plate?”

“Felicity doesn’t pick up her phone,” Clete said to me, ignoring Albert. “I think Surrette has her.”

Molly and Alafair had stopped eating. “Clete, I don’t want to hear about that woman,” Molly said.

“You want to take a ride?” Clete said, his eyes on me.

“Where?” I said.

“To Love Younger’s,” Clete said.

“No, he doesn’t,” Molly said. “I mean it, Clete. Don’t bring that woman’s troubles into our lives.”

“Five minutes ago this was my home,” Albert said. “Do you people carry a fight with you every place you go?”

“I’ll be right back,” I said. I walked out into the yard with Clete. The sun had dipped behind the ridge, and in the shadows, I could feel the temperature dropping, the dampness rising from the grass and flower beds. “I know you’re worried, but think about what you just said,” I told him. “Felicity Louviere is an intelligent woman. She’s not going to deliberately put herself in the hands of a depraved man.”

“You don’t know her,” he said. “Maybe she wants to suffer. Maybe she wants to cancel his ticket. But she always leaves her cell phone on for me. Now I go directly to voice mail.”

“Then let her live with her own choices.”

“That’s a chickenshit thing to say.”

“I meant let her pop him if she can. What she may be doing is not any crazier than what Gretchen has been doing.”

“You want to nail Surrette or not?”

“He tried to kill Alafair, Clete. What do you think?”

“You’re not hearing me. My point is, we’re smarter than this guy. Money is involved, but it’s not the issue. It’s personal, and it’s coming out of the Younger family. It also involves Wyatt Dixon. And I’ve got another suspicion.”

“What?”

“Maybe it’s off-the-wall.”

“Say it.”

“I wonder if Albert has something to do with it. He has a way of bringing people out of the woodwork.”

“I’ve thought the same thing.”

We looked at each other. I walked up on the porch and opened the door slightly. “Albert, could you step out here, please?” I said.

He came outside and closed the door behind him. He was wearing a heavy cotton shirt and corduroy trousers with a wide leather belt outside the loops and sandals with rope soles, the way a Spanish peasant might. He was smiling, his small blue eyes buried inside his face.

“Is there any reason Asa Surrette would want to do you harm?” I said.

“Maybe he doesn’t like my books.”

“Any other reason?” I said.

“Maybe he didn’t like my film adaptations. No one did.”

“This isn’t funny,” Clete said.

“That’s what the producers said when they lost their shirts.”

“Think,” I said. “Did you ever have contact with this guy? Or anyone who could have been him?”

“I don’t think he’d be someone I’d forget. I spent four weeks in Wichita and loved the people there. I didn’t have a negative experience with anyone. They’re the best people I’ve ever met. What I’ve never understood is why they live in Kansas.”

“You were in Wichita?” I said.

“I was writer-in-residence in their MFA program. I taught a three-hour seminar one night a week for a month. They were all nice young people. You’re barking up the wrong stump, Dave.”

“What year?” I said.

“The winter term of 1979.”

“Surrette was a student at Wichita State University then.”

“Not in my class, he wasn’t.”

“How do you know?” Clete asked.

“I still have my grade sheets. I checked them. He’s not on there.”

“Was anyone auditing the class, sitting in without formally enrolling?” I said.

“Two or three people came and went. I never checked roll.”

“Surrette told Alafair he had a creative writing professor who claimed to be a friend of Leicester Hemingway.”

Albert’s eyes had been fixed on the north pasture and the horses drinking at the tank. They came back on mine. “He did?”

“Surrette accused this creative professor of name-dropping,” I said. “He seemed to bear him great resentment.”

“I knew Les many years,” Albert said. “I fished with him in the Keys and visited his home in Bimini. He always said he was going to start up his own country on an island off Bimini. It was going to be a republic made up of writers and artists and jai-alai players and musicians. He even had a flag.”

“Surrette said this professor wouldn’t read his short story to the class,” I said. “Do you remember anything like that?”

Albert’s gaze roved around the yard, as though he saw realities in the shadows that no one else did. He was breathing hard through his nose, his mouth pinched. “I don’t recall the exact content of the story, but I thought it was an assault on the sensibilities rather than an attempt at fiction. It was genuinely offensive. He was older than the others. I think I told him it was too mature a story for some of the younger people in the seminar. He seemed to take it well enough, at least as I recall. Maybe we’re talking about a different fellow.”

“Surrette also said he wrote a note on the evaluation, something to the effect that he understood your objection to a story about boys chewing on each other’s weenies.”

I saw the color drain from Albert’s face. He started to speak, then looked up at the hillside and the dark conical shapes of the trees that hid the cave where Asa Surrette had camped. “I’ll be,” he said.

“It was Surrette?” I said.

“How does the expression go? There’s no fool like an old fool?” he said.

On Saturday, Wyatt Dixon emerged from his Airstream trailer at the fairgrounds and flexed his shoulders in appreciation of the summer evening and the salmon-colored sky and the neon ambience of the amusement rides and game booths and concession stands that had defined his youth and were, in his opinion, as much a stained-glass work of art as any fashioned from stone by medieval guildsmen. He had put on his puff-sleeved sky-blue shirt with red stars on the shoulders, his championship buckle, and his soft lavender red-fringed butterfly chaps and a Stetson that fit tightly on his head, down low on the brow, one that didn’t fly off with the first bounce out of the bucking chute. The summer light was trapped high in the sky, as though it had no other place to go, the breeze balmy and redolent of meat fires. What finer place was there?

If only Bertha would close her mouth for a little while. “You’re too old for it,” she said, following him out the door onto the apron of grass where they had dropped the trailer. “Do you want to be a quadriplegic? Do you want to wear a drip bag under your clothes for the rest of your life?”

“I rode Bodacious to the buzzer, woman,” he replied. “There ain’t many can say that. We used to call him the widow-maker. I rode him into a tube steak. What do you think of that?”

“Call me ‘woman’ again, and I’m going to slap you cross-eyed.”

“Bertha, I’m not exaggerating, blood is leaking out of my ears.”

“Where are you going?”

“To get a brain transplant.”

“Please, Wyatt.”

“I got the message. Even though I am near deaf, by God, I got the message.”

“You won’t ride?”

“I don’t think I said that. You want some cotton candy or a tater pig?”

“No, I do not. I want you to act like a reasonable human being.”

“There ain’t no fun in that.”

She threw a slipper at his head.

Oh, well, he’d known worse, he consoled himself. When he was seventeen, he’d married a Mexican woman who used to blow flaming kerosene out of her mouth in a carnival. Or at least he thought he’d married her. The two of them had eaten enough peyote buttons to start a cactus farm and had woken up on top of a bus loaded with stoned hippies on their way to San Luis Potosi. He remembered a ceremony conducted by an Indian shaman dressed in feathers; he was almost sure of that. But maybe the ceremony was a funeral, because somebody had dropped a wooden casket off a mountainside, and Wyatt had seen it bounce and break apart on the rocks. Or maybe the fire-eater was in the casket. Or maybe that was her mother. It was somebody, for sure.

He had decided long ago that memory and reliving the good times weren’t all they were cracked up to be. Anyway, Bertha Phelps was a good woman. The problem was, she was too good. She worried about him day and night and made love like it was about to be outlawed, sometimes leaving him worn out in the morning and afraid she would corner him in the bedroom by midafternoon.

He bought her a tater pig whether she wanted it or not, and a great big fluffy cone of cotton candy for himself. He heard the announcer on the loudspeaker in the box above the bucking chutes tell the crowd to stand up for “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Through an aisle lined with game booths, he saw a familiar figure walking toward him, followed by three men wearing suits and shades.

Wyatt was not up for another session with a billionaire oilman who just wouldn’t let it alone, whatever “it” was. Wyatt had never given much thought to rich people; he’d always assumed they had the same vices and compulsions as everyone else but were a whole lot smarter about hiding them. He didn’t care what they were, as long as they tended to their own business, which was buying politicians and making sure the toilets flushed and the cops got paid off, and nobody told him what he could and couldn’t do.

Too late.

“I just want a couple of minutes,” Love Younger said.

“Not a good idea,” Wyatt said.

“Come on, sit down, son. Let me have my say, and I’ll be gone.”

They were standing on a grassy spot under a birch tree by the bingo concession, the grandstand not far away, buzzing with noise. “Is that Jack Shit with you?”

“That’s Jack Boyd.”

“What happened to him?” Wyatt asked.

“Excuse me, I have to rest a minute,” Younger said, easing himself down at one of the plank tables. “Age is a clever thief. It takes a little from you each day, so you’re not aware of your loss until it’s irreversible.”

Wyatt could hear the announcer in the grandstands trading jokes with one of the rodeo clowns. “Tell me what you’re after and be done with it,” he said, and sat down at the table.

“My granddaughter is dead,” Younger said. “My daughter-in-law has disappeared, and my son is dissolute and perhaps in a dangerous state of mind.”

“What’s that got to do with me?” Wyatt asked.

“Be patient. I’m trying to set some things straight without causing unnecessary harm to anyone. Have you seen my son?”

“I wouldn’t know what he looks like. What the hell is this?”

“What would you do if a great amount of money came into your hands?” Younger asked.

“I’d ask what the trade-off was, ’cause ain’t nothing comes free. Second of all, I’d probably say kiss my ass, ’cause I ain’t interested in what other people own.”

“Then you’re a rare man.”

“You didn’t answer my question about Jack Shit.”

“A man named Clete Purcel attacked him.”

“You let Louisiana Fats knock you around?” Wyatt said to Boyd.

“Listen to me, son,” Younger said.

“Take your goddamn hand off me. Don’t be calling me ‘son’ again, either.”

“The fates have not been kind to you. I want to correct that if I can. Do you understand what I’m trying to say?”

“No, I got no idea. I’m getting pretty tired of it, too. How come you always got guys like this around? People that’s been inside or belong there?”

“I try to give other men a second chance. Pap, why did he beat you? Why did he have such animus toward you?”

“Ani-what?”

“You’re part Shawnee Indian, boy. It’s in your profile. Your people were trash, but you’re a warrior. Look at my hands, look at yours. Those are hands that could break down a brick wall. How do you think you ended up the man you are? You think your genes came from your worthless father or your whore of a mother? Was it the nigger in the woodpile?”

“You get the fuck away from me, old man,” Wyatt said.

He threw his cotton candy and Bertha’s tater pig in a garbage barrel and walked behind the bucking chutes, a sound like fireworks popping in his head. He squatted in the sawdust and began buckling on his spurs.

“You’re not up, Wyatt,” a cowboy said.

“Hell I ain’t.”

“I’m just doing my job.”

Wyatt lifted his eyes to the cowboy’s face. “Do I got to say it again?”

He climbed on top of the chute while his horse was loaded, then eased down on its back, hooking his left palm through the braided suitcase handle on the bucking rig. Like most rough stock, the horse was almost feral, walleyed, jerking up its head, its body quivering with fear and rage at the confines of the chute, knocking against the wood sides, trying to kick itself free of the flank strap.

Wyatt fixed his hat and steadied himself. “Outside!” he said.

He was once again borne aloft, his legs up, his body springing backward almost to the croup, the rowels of his spurs slashing down, the twelve hundred pounds of gelding thudding so hard into the sod that Wyatt thought his sphincter had been broken and he was about to urinate into his athletic supporter. He’d drawn Buster’s Boogie, a hot-wired gelding that had crippled a rider for life at the Russian River Rodeo in California. Buster’s Boogie sunfished twice, then corkscrewed and twisted sideways unexpectedly, all within three seconds. Wyatt saw the grandstand begin rotating around him, then the bucking chutes, then the Ferris wheel, then the greased faces of the clowns by the rubber barrel, as though he were stationary and the entire world, even the stars embroidered on the pink sky, had all become part of a giant Tilt-A-Whirl that had gone out of control and was doing things that had never happened to him before.

He felt the gelding explode under him with renewed energy, prying Wyatt’s clamped legs loose from its sides, flinging him high in the air, his shoulders and back still hunched in a rider’s position, the suitcase handle slipping beyond his reach, the ground suddenly coming up like a fist, the blat of the eight-second buzzer coming too late, almost like a pent-up mockery that had never been allowed to express itself.

He heard the thud when he struck the sod, then all sound went out of his head, as though he had been plunged deep underwater, his lungs collapsing like punctured balloons, his eardrums about to burst. He saw the pickup rider coming hard toward him, swinging down from the stirrup, a paramedic running with a first-aid bag, the crowd rising in unison, their faces filled with pity and sorrow.

I’m all right, he wanted to say. I just got the wind knocked out of me. There ain’t no problem down here. Just let me get on my feet. Anybody seen my hat? Why y’all looking at me like that? Have I done gone and messed myself?

His shirt was wet. He clutched it in his fingers and pulled it loose from his belt and saw the starlike wound where his championship silver buckle had punched a hole in his stomach, releasing a fluid that felt more like water than blood.

Then he saw Bertha Phelps running toward him, her breasts bouncing inside her oversize dress, her body haloed by the electric lights and humidity and dust and desiccated manure in the arena. He wanted to ask her if someone had just played a terrible joke on him. The kind Pap might play, if he were still alive and full of meanness, ready to work mischief in the world in any fashion he could.