Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  When he woke, the shadow of his truck was in the same place where it had been when he was hit with the baton, but Bertha Phelps was gone. His hands were tied behind him with rope, and his wallet and its contents were scattered on the ground. He got on his knees and worked the rope under the bumper, then rose to a squat and strained against the rope to the point where he thought his molars would break. He took a breath and tried again, this time tearing the skin off his knuckles. Suddenly, he was free and standing erect, his head throbbing, his hands bleeding. He pulled on his underwear and Wranglers and searched for his Tony Lama boots and the six-inch bone-handled Solingen clasp knife he carried. They were not there. Neither was the money in his wallet.

  Who were they? Some guys fresh out of the can, maybe wiped out on crystal? These days the jails were full of guys with no class, all rut and penis and shit for brains. Where was Bertha?

  The wind changed and he heard her voice up the slope, deep in the trees, and he had no doubt what the three men were doing to her.

  He opened the back of the camper shell. His 1892 lever-action Winchester lay on the floor, but the shells for it were at his house. He reached into a duffel bag where he kept his camping gear and removed an army-surplus entrenching tool. The blade was locked into the straight-out position of a shovel, the edges of the blade filed clean and sharp. His gaze swept across the hillside, then he ran to the left of where the men had probably entered the trees with Bertha, the hatched scar tissue on his back as white as snow.

  The floor of the forest was soft with damp grass and seepage from a spring in the hillside. To his right, inside a widely spaced stand of ponderosa lit by a solitary band of sunlight, two men were holding Bertha on her back while the third man attempted to mount her. When she tried to cry out, one man scooped a handful of dirt from the ground and poured it into her mouth.

  They were still wearing their masks and apparently had not heard him coming. When they heard his bare feet running across the forest floor, they twisted their heads toward him in unison, frozen in time, like men who’d thought they possessed total control of the environment only to discover they had just locked themselves in a box with the most dangerous man they had ever met.

  Wyatt’s upper body was streaming sweat and stenciled with nests of veins when he struck the first blow, catching the man on top of Bertha across the back, slicing through his shirt, slinging blood through the air. He wielded the e-tool like a medieval battle-ax and didn’t aim his blows or plan his attack. The power of his swing and the level of energy and rage that went into each blow was devastating and similar in effect to a jackhammer deconstructing a plywood house. Oddly, there was little sound inside the grove of columnlike pines, other than the muffled grunts his adversaries made behind their masks whenever he hit them.

  Bertha got to her feet, stumbling off balance down the hill, her backside covered with dirt and twigs and leaves and pine needles. Wyatt kicked a man in the groin and split his scalp when he doubled over, and was sure he broke a third man’s ribs when he stomped him on the ground.

  There was blood on the trunks of the trees. Wyatt was revolving in a circle, hitting his assailants as many times as he could, inflicting as much bone damage as possible before their superiority in numbers took its toll. One man fell out of the fight and scrambled away on his hands and knees, then rose to his feet and began running, his mask off, his long blond hair tumbling from a bandana that had come loose on his head. That was the moment when Wyatt made a critical mistake. He took time to try to see the running man’s face and instead saw a hand with a rock in it swing from the corner of his vision. His eyebrow split against the bone, and he tumbled down the side of a ravine into a creek bed.

  The man who had struck the blow followed Wyatt in his slide down to the water’s edge. He wore a painter’s cap pulled down tightly on his scalp and a long-sleeved black shirt and tan strap overalls. The hair on his chest resembled gold wires. Wyatt was standing in the creek, his feet freezing. He had another problem. Just before he went over the side of the ravine, he felt his ankle fold under him, like a thick tuber bent back on itself.

  The man in the painter’s hat opened Wyatt’s six-inch clasp knife and held it out from his body, blade up. “I’m gonna cut off your sack, Jack,” he said, his voice echoing inside his mask.

  Wyatt had dropped the e-tool at the top of the ravine. He picked up part of a cottonwood limb from the rocks. It felt soggy and cold and foolish in his hands, the leaves dripping into the stream.

  Long ago, on the yard, Wyatt had learned that real badasses didn’t talk. Nor did they shave their heads and wear tats from the wrist to the armpit. Nor did they mob up with the Aryan Brotherhood. Genuine badasses curled 150 pounds, picked up five hundred on their shoulders, and did fifty push-ups while another guy sat on their backs. Their bodies radiated lethality the way hog shit radiated stink. As an old con in Huntsville once told him, silence was your greatest strength. It forced your enemies into the theater of the mind, where their fears ate them alive.

  “Then we’re gonna finish our date with your gash,” the man in overalls said.

  Wyatt didn’t move. He could hear the water coursing around his feet and ankles and the cuffs of his jeans, the canopy swaying high above the ravine.

  “Looks like you might have broke your ankle,” the man in tan overalls said.

  Had he heard the voice behind that mask before? He couldn’t be sure. It was distorted, as though rising from the bottom of a stone well. Why wasn’t the man carrying a piece?

  “Maybe we’ll call it a draw,” the man said. “Maybe you learned your lesson.”

  Lesson about what? Wyatt thought.

  “You got nothing to say?”

  He blinked inside the mask. He’s lost his guts. He’s fixing to step backward.

  “Count your blessings, Tex,” the man said. “We’re going to allow you to walk out of here. The broad got off easy, too. If you ask me, she majored in ugly.”

  When the man in strap overalls stepped backward, Wyatt whipped the cottonwood limb down on his forearm, knocking the knife from his hand onto the rocks. He swung again and missed, his ankle folding under him, a sickening pain traveling upward into his genitals and stomach. He threw himself forward and grabbed the man’s legs and tried to pull him down but lost his purchase in the stream and was barely able to hang on to the man’s right wrist.

  The man fell backward, stomping Wyatt in the face. His gloves were cloth, the kind you would buy in a garden store. As he pulled away from Wyatt, his left glove slipped down to his knuckles, exposing the back of his hand. On it was a tattoo of a red spider. He kicked Wyatt in the side of the head and in seconds was running through the trees.

  TWO HOURS LATER, Wyatt was sitting on the side of an examination table in the ER at Community Medical Center, out by old Fort Missoula, his ankle wrapped, his eyebrow stitched. A plainclothes detective pulled back the curtain and stared at him. “Heard you had some bad luck today.”

  “You could call it that,” Wyatt said. “I seen you somewhere before?”

  “I don’t know. Have you?”

  “By that cave up behind Albert Hollister’s house. Except you were in uniform. You and Detective Pepper was talking about the Horowitz woman, something about needing a board across your ass so you wouldn’t fall in.”

  The detective was a lean and angular man with grainy skin and jet-black hair and sideburns that flared on his cheeks. He had a mustache and wore a new suit of dark fabric with blue stripes. He looked like he hadn’t shaved in at least two days. “Did you recognize any of your assailants?” he asked.

  “They had on masks. I need to see Miss Bertha.”

  “I just left her. She’s fine.”

  “When was the last time you seen a rape victim doing fine?”

  “Were they white men? Not Indian or African-American or Hispanic?”

  “I don’t know what they was.”

  “You see any identifying marks?”

  “No.”
>
  “None? No tattoos, scars, that sort of thing?”

  “They were buttoned up. One man had a baton.”

  “Like a policeman’s?”

  “Or an MP’s. He put himself into it.”

  “What was it made of?”

  “Wood. It had a lanyard.”

  “Police officers don’t use that kind anymore.”

  “That makes me feel a whole lot better.”

  The detective stopped writing in his notebook. “You don’t like us much, do you?”

  “I learned to read lips in prison.”

  “I’m not quite making the connection.”

  “I saw you out in the hall earlier. You was telling a joke to another guy. It was about Miss Bertha.”

  The detective dropped his eyes to his notepad and wrote in it.

  “What are you putting down?” Wyatt asked.

  “That you read lips. That’s quite a talent.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Detective Jack Boyd. I don’t have a business card yet. Call the department if you want to add anything to your statement.”

  “You took Detective Pepper’s place?”

  “What about it?”

  “I think they got the right man for the job,” Wyatt said.

  MOLLY AND I were clearing the table at sunset when she glanced out the French doors at the backyard. “Dave, come here,” she said.

  A man in a slouched cowboy hat was sitting atop the fence that bordered the north end of the pasture. He was drinking from a longneck, tilting it up, letting the foam slide down his throat, his boots hooked on the rail below him. He dropped the empty bottle on the grass and took a second one from the pocket of his canvas coat and twisted off the cap, then put the cap in his coat pocket. Albert’s horses were gathered around a circular water tank on the other side of the fence, their tails whipping at flies. The sky was purple, hung with dark clouds that looked like torn cotton. The man on the fence looked up at the lights in the kitchen and dining area and took a long drink from his beer bottle. “That’s Wyatt Dixon,” I said.

  “The one Alafair had the run-in with?”

  “The one and only.”

  “Why is he here?”

  “The day you figure out a guy like Dixon is the day you check yourself into rehab.”

  I put on a coat and walked down to the fence. The double metal gate to the pasture was creaking in the wind, the lock chain clinking softly. “You always throw your beer bottles on other people’s lawns?” I said.

  “I was gonna pick it up when I left.” He glanced at the cabin in the south pasture. The light was on inside, and you could see Clete’s rubber waders hanging upside down on the gallery. “Where’s Dumbo at?”

  “I’d give some thought to what I said about Clete Purcel. What happened to your eye?”

  “A guy caught me with a rock. That was after him and two others attacked the woman I was with. She’s at Community Hospital now.”

  “Who were the guys?”

  “I got an idea who one of them was.”

  “You told the cops that?”

  He twisted his mouth into a button. He was wearing half-top boots that looked like buckets on his feet and seemed out of character. “I come here to get your opinion on something,” he said.

  “Why me?”

  “I checked out you and that fat-ass friend of yours. Y’all got in a shoot-out down in Louisiana and flushed the grits of some guys just like Love Younger and his crowd.”

  “You have reason to believe Love Younger sent these three men after you?”

  “One guy had a tattoo on the back of his hand. I’ve seen it before.”

  “On somebody who works for Love Younger?”

  “Here’s what don’t compute. I got nothing on Love Younger. He’s rich and powerful, and I’m an ex-con and rough-stock supplier at state fairs. Why would I be a threat to him?”

  “Who was the woman they attacked?”

  “Her name is Bertha Phelps.”

  “The lady at the rez?”

  “She probably never hurt a soul in her life. With time she may get over it. But she won’t be the same. They never are.”

  “If I understand you correctly, these guys did everything they could to provoke you, but they managed to leave you alive, knowing what you’d probably do.”

  “None of them tried to pull a piece. Maybe they wasn’t carrying. Maybe they just wanted to shake me up. They ain’t high-end operators, that’s for sure. One of them stole my cordovan Tony Lama boots.”

  “You think you’re being set up?”

  “Ever see a bullfight? Before the matador comes out, the banderilleros stick the banderillas in the bull’s neck. They’re like miniature harpoons. The barbs hurt like hell and get the bull into a rage. That’s when he makes mistakes and gets a sword in the soft spot between the shoulder blades.”

  “Knowing all that, you still want to get even?”

  “An eye for an eye.”

  “That’s not what the admonition means.”

  “What it means is don’t tread on me. I celled with a guy in Texas whose kid was murdered by a pedophile. He chain-drug him down a highway. What do you think of that?”

  He took a sip from his beer, looking sideways at me, waiting for me to answer. His mind-set was one that every Southerner recognizes. Whether it’s a defective element in the gene pool or an atavistic throwback to the peat bogs of Celtic Europe, it is nonetheless the family heirloom of a class of people who are not only uneducable but take pride in their ignorance and their potential for violence. If you have the opportunity, study their faces carefully in a photograph, perhaps one taken at what they call a “cross lighting,” and tell me they descend from the same tree as the rest of us.

  “You just conceded somebody is trying to throw you a slider. Why swing on it?” I said.

  “Maybe I got tricks they don’t know about. Maybe I’ll call down fire and lightning on the whole bunch.”

  “You think you have that kind of power?”

  He shook his head. “No, I ain’t got no power at all. I was just talking. They done permanent harm to Miss Bertha, and they got to pay for it, Mr. Robicheaux. You’d do the same. Don’t be telling me you wouldn’t. I know the kind of man you are. You might try to hide it, but I can see it in your eyes.”

  He climbed down from the fence, favoring one foot. He clasped the neck of the beer bottle with three fingers and tilted it to his mouth and drank until it was empty. Then he stuck it in one coat pocket and picked the empty off the grass and stuck it in his other pocket. He winked at me. “See, I always keep my word,” he said.

  I was wrong about Wyatt Dixon. If this man could be placed in a category, I had no idea what it was.

  I COULDN’T BLAME CLETE for what he did next. He had never done well when he left South Louisiana. Most GIs hated Vietnam and its corruption and humid weather and the stink of buffalo feces in its rice paddies. Not Clete. The banyan and palm trees, the clouds of steam rising off a rain forest, the French colonial architecture, the neon-lit backstreet bars of Saigon, a sudden downpour clicking on clusters of philodendron and banana fronds in a courtyard, the sloe-eyed girls who beckoned from a balcony, an angelus bell ringing at six A.M., all of these things could have been postcards mailed to him from the city of his birth.

  For many people, New Orleans was a song that sank beneath the waves. For Clete, New Orleans was a state of mind that would never change, a Caribbean port that practiced old-world manners, its pagan culture disguised by a thin veneer of Christianity. The dialect sounded more like Brooklyn than the South, because most of its blue-collar people were descended from Italian and Irish immigrants. The gentry often had accents like Walker Percy or Robert Penn Warren and had an iambic cadence in their speech that on occasion could turn an ordinary conversation into a sonnet.

  People referred to “lunch” as “dinner.” “Big-mouth bass” were “green trout.” The “esplanade” was the “neutral ground.” A “snowball” was a
lways spelled as “sno’ball.” The street Burgundy was pronounced as “Burgundy.” “New Orleans” was pronounced as “New Or Lons” and never, under any circumstances, not even at gunpoint, “Nawlens.”

  Sometimes in the early-morning hours, Clete rode the St. Charles streetcar to the end of the line in Carrollton, the fog puffing in clouds from the live oaks that formed a canopy over the neutral ground. Then he rode the car back to Canal and walked through the Quarter to his office on St. Ann and never told anybody, his secretary included, where he had been.

  Clete practiced a private religion and had his own pew inside a cathedral no one else knew about. He never told others of his pain, nor would he allow himself to be treated as a victim. He hid his scars, made light of his problems, and despised those who preyed on the weak and those who championed wars but avoided fighting when it was their turn. You could say his value system was little different from that of Geoffrey Chaucer’s good knight. I suspect there was a bit of Saint Francis in him as well.

  I can’t say exactly why he was drawn to Felicity Louviere, but I have an idea. She was diminutive and seemed never to have been exposed to a harsh light, like a nocturnal flower that needed to be protected from the sun. The black mole by her mouth seemed less an imperfection than an invitation for a man to lean down and kiss her. Her little-girl vulnerability did not fit with her robust figure and the dark and lustrous thickness of her hair and the mercurial changes in her manner, one moment grief-ridden, one moment seductive, one moment angry, perhaps because her father lost his life while trying to do good for others and left his daughter to founder.

  Maybe the attraction was her accent, one you hear only in uptown New Orleans, an accent so singular and melodic that actors and actresses can seldom imitate it. Or maybe it was the fact that she was named by her father for a brave woman who died in a Roman arena.

  Felicity Louviere was a mystery, and therein lay her attraction for Clete Purcel. She represented his memories of old New Orleans—alluring, profligate, addictive, filled with self-destructive impulses, her beauty as fragile as that of a white rose with a black spot on one petal. The greatest irony of Felicity’s contradictions was her name. Did she, like her namesake, have the strength and resolve of a martyr? Did she have the courage of Felicity’s fellow martyr, Perpetua, who pointed the sword of her executioner into her side? Or was she a deceiver, a female acolyte of the Great Whore of Babylon?