Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  “It ain’t mine.”

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s too small. I’ll show you.” Wyatt picked up the boot and felt for the label inside. “This one is a ten and a half. I wear a twelve.”

  “Your feet don’t look like a twelve to me.”

  Wyatt pointed to a pair of suede half-top boots in the grass. “Check them out.”

  “You could be wearing those because you have an ACE bandage on your ankle.”

  “I wear them because my feet are a size twelve. If that was my boot, I’d take it and ask you where the other one was at. But it ain’t mine.”

  Wyatt’s face remained empty of expression. He looked at his nails, then up through the cottonwoods at the sky, seemingly uninterested in the origins of the boot. The detective handed him a photo lineup with six mug shots. “You ever see any of these men?”

  Wyatt studied the photos. “I’ve seen this guy here in the middle.”

  “Are you positive?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Where?”

  “At the fairgrounds or a powwow.”

  “When?”

  “Last summer. Up at the Indian rodeo on the rez.”

  “That’s interesting, because he died in Deer Lodge ten years ago. I reread the report, Dixon. You said one of your attackers had long blond hair. He lost his mask, and his bandana came loose from his head. That’s when you saw his hair. You must have seen at least part of his face.”

  “That was at the same time I got hit upside the head with a rock.”

  The detective tapped his finger on the mug shot of a man whose eyes seemed mismatched, as though they had been transplanted from two separate faces. “Did you ever see this man?”

  “No. Who is he?”

  “Kyle Schumacher. He did three years in California for statutory rape.”

  “Where’d you get the boot?”

  “If it’s not yours, you don’t need to worry about it. On second thought, I guess it won’t hurt anything. A PI from New Orleans brought it in.”

  Wyatt watched a wood duck bob down the middle of the riffle. “Y’all hear anything else about that waitress who disappeared up by Lookout Pass?”

  “What about her?”

  “You don’t think the same guy who killed Angel Deer Heart might have kidnapped the waitress?”

  “There’s no evidence linking the two cases.”

  “I’m trying to track your logic, Detective. The stuff you ain’t been able to find somehow proves there ain’t no relationship between the two cases?”

  “Maybe you ought to apply for a job with the sheriff’s department in Mineral County. You could conduct your own investigation.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  The detective picked up the boot and replaced it in the sack. “I thought we might have our man,” he said. “Too bad.”

  “Are you supposed to give away the name of a suspect in a photo lineup?”

  “What difference does it make? You said he’s not our guy.”

  Wyatt picked up his gin bottle from the grass and flipped it in the air and caught it. “You said something about me riding a woman hard and putting her away wet. Was you talking about Miss Bertha or not?”

  There was a long silence. “It was just a joke.”

  “A joke about Miss Bertha?”

  The detective’s throat bladed with color. “I wasn’t talking about any woman in particular,” he said. “No, I wasn’t saying anything about her.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Wyatt said.

  IT WAS EVENING before Wyatt Dixon worked up the courage to go see Bertha Phelps. He rode the elevator up to her apartment overlooking the Clark Fork and knocked. When she opened the door, it was hooked on the chain. He saw her nostrils swell. “Have you been drinking?” she said.

  “I was. I ain’t now.”

  “Is that detective out there?”

  “No. He come to my house, though. You want me to go away?”

  “I just don’t like to see you hurt yourself. If you want to know the truth, I’ve been awfully worried.” She slid the chain and opened the door. “I didn’t think you were a drinking man.”

  “I ain’t. At least not the hard stuff.”

  “You sit down at the table. I’m going to fix you a cup of coffee and a plate of lasagna. I called you three times. Why didn’t you answer?”

  “I was out of sorts. I get that way sometimes.”

  “Because I deceived you?”

  “That plainclothes detective said you spoke up for me.”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Did you know there’s people that’s not capable of doing wrong, at least not deliberately?” he said.

  “You fixing to give me a compliment? If you are, don’t. I don’t care for flattery, Wyatt.”

  “You’re one of them kind, Miss Bertha. You’re a good lady with a big heart.”

  “Don’t be calling me ‘miss’ anymore, either.”

  He sat down at the table by the window. There were children riding the wooden horses on the carousel, each of them leaning far out of the saddle to grab the brass ring that guaranteed them a free ride. “Did you study history in college?” he asked.

  “I went to business school. I’m not as highly educated as you think.”

  “I’m looking for a preacher who calls hisself Geta Noonen. I couldn’t find nobody by that name on the Internet. You ever hear the name Geta before?”

  “Not that I recall.”

  “I did a Google search on it. There was a Roman emperor with that name. He was the brother of a guy named Caracalla.”

  “I don’t understand what we’re talking about.” She took a plate of lasagna out of the microwave with a dish towel and carried it to the table. “Start eating. You need to start taking a whole lot better care of yourself.”

  “When this guy Caracalla wasn’t building baths, he was killing people, including his brother Geta.”

  “Why are you looking for this preacher?”

  “I think maybe he kidnapped that waitress up by the Idaho line. I don’t believe he’s a preacher. I think he’s somebody who comes from a place people don’t want to study on.”

  “Those are the shadows of the heart speaking. It’s part of our upbringing that we have to get rid of, Wyatt.”

  “I didn’t learn about evil in a church house. I learned about it from my fellow man.”

  “That’s because you never knew love. You have to forget those years in prison and forgive the people who hurt you.”

  “I ain’t real big on the latter.”

  “It’ll happen one day down the road. Then your life will change. In the meantime, just be the man you are.”

  “That preacher may be the man who killed your brother.”

  She brought him a cup of coffee and sat down across the table from him. Through the window, he could hear the music from the carousel. “I don’t want to talk about that anymore,” she said. “I want to let go of all the evil in the world and never have it in my life again.”

  “Why would a phony preacher choose the name of a Roman emperor?”

  “You mustn’t drink anymore,” she said.

  “I won’t.”

  “Please don’t go out and do something you’ll regret.” When he didn’t reply, she said, “Are you going to answer me?”

  He put the tines of his fork through a piece of lasagna and placed it in his mouth, gazing out the window at the redness of the sun on the river and the way the children kept grabbing at the brass ring, no matter how many times their outstretched fingers went flying past it.

  The day was cooling, the leaves scudding along the concrete walkways, more like fall than summer. Wyatt felt a chill in his body that he couldn’t explain. “I never make plans. Nobody knows what’s gonna happen tomorrow. So there ain’t no use in planning for it. That’s the way I see it.”

  “You can choose to be the person you want, can’t you?”

  “What some call revenge, I
call justice.”

  “They’re not the same.”

  “Is this food Italian?”

  “Don’t hurt me any more than you have. Don’t you seek revenge in my name.”

  “I ain’t meant to hurt you, Bertha. You ever been on a carousel?”

  “When I was a child.”

  “Let’s go down there and take a ride in those big seats for adults. Then we’ll go for ice cream,” he said.

  “If that’s what you want,” she replied.

  “See the sky? It looks like it’s raining way out there on the edge of the world, like you could sail right into it and leave all your cares behind. That’s what I’d like to do one day, with you at my side. Just sail right off the edge of the earth into the rain.”

  THAT SAME EVENING Gretchen Horowitz lay on her stomach in front of Albert’s television set, on the bottom floor of the house, and watched a DVD of the cable series The Borgias. She watched it for three hours. Albert came downstairs from the kitchen with a cup of cocoa and a plate of graham crackers. “I thought you might like these,” he said.

  “Pardon?” she said, not taking her eyes from the screen.

  “I’ll put them down here,” he replied, and turned to go.

  She paused the show with the remote. “That’s nice of you,” she said.

  “What do you like most about that series?”

  “It reminds me of The Godfather. I think The Godfather is the best movie ever made. Every scene is a short story that can stand by itself.”

  “Really?” he said.

  She turned on her side and looked up at him. “See, The Godfather is not about the Mob. It’s about Elizabethan tragedy. Have you ever met anybody in the Mob?”

  “I don’t recall anyone introducing himself to me that way. Do they hand out business cards?”

  She ignored his joke. “Most of them are dumb and smell like hair oil and garlic. My mother used to be the house prostitute in three hotels on Miami Beach. She did the Arabs for a while, then went back to screwing the greaseballs. On balance, I think the greaseballs were the bigger challenge. I think that’s why she got out of the life.”

  Albert stared at her as though the floor were tilting under his feet.

  “Did I say something wrong?” she asked.

  “No, not at all.”

  “Did you watch The Sopranos?”

  “A little bit.”

  “That’s what the Mob is really like. The only honest work they can do is recycling garbage. Here’s the deal about that series. It’s not tragedy. The Godfather is. You know why people kept watching The Sopranos?”

  “No.”

  “They wanted to see Tony Soprano find redemption. Too bad. Tony murdered his nephew and turned out to be a dumb shit who didn’t want redemption. I think the creators of The Sopranos did a number on their audience. Do you know what John Huston always told his people? ‘Respect your audience.’ ”

  “Your ideas are interesting,” Albert said.

  “That’s what people say when they’re grossed out and don’t know how to exit a social situation.”

  He sat down, his hands propped on his knees, and looked at the frozen image on the television screen of Pope Alexander VI burning his archenemy alive. “You know what the hard road in Florida was?”

  “A chain gang?”

  “I spent a half year on one. I also did some time in a parish prison in Louisiana. Of all the boys I knew inside, I’d say only two or three of them were sociopaths. The rest of them could have led good lives if somebody had cared about them.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “No reason. I think you’re an artist. I think you have a great future ahead of you.”

  “How much of my history are you aware of, Mr. Hollister?”

  “I don’t care about your past or anyone else’s. The past is nothing more than a decaying memory. Clete and Dave and his family think highly of you. That’s good enough for me. You tried to help Wyatt Dixon when he was tormented by that detective. That’s your history, that’s the woman you are. Don’t ever let other people tell you different. If they do, it’s for one reason only.”

  “What?” she said, looking at him in a different way.

  “They want you to lose.”

  “I appreciate that,” she said.

  “Advice is cheap,” he said. He climbed back up the stairs, silhouetted against the kitchen light, one hand on the rail, his shoulders and back as round and hard-looking as a stone arch.

  She turned off the television and went outside into the twilight to check an infrared trail camera she had strapped to a tree trunk behind the house. The camera had a camouflaged housing that could be left for days or weeks or even months to capture images of wildlife passing through a stand of timber. The only technological downside was its inability to distinguish the movement of animals from the wind blowing through the trees and underbrush, causing the lens to click every fifteen seconds, until both the batteries and the space on the memory card were used up.

  Gretchen loosened the canvas strap on the tree trunk and slid the camera out and used the viewing screen to click through the images on the memory card. She saw an elk with one eye pushed against the lens, a skunk, a flock of wild turkeys dropping from a tree, a cougar cub, and a black bear. Then a man.

  Or what she thought was a man. The figure was erect, moving uphill, the head twisted away from the lens as though the figure had just heard a sound down below. The next photo had been taken fifteen seconds later. In it, the figure was deep inside the second growth and the black shade that fell on the mountain immediately after sunset, its dimensions impossible to estimate. She looked at the date and time the two frames had been taken. The figure had passed in front of the camera ten minutes earlier.

  She showed no reaction. She slid the camera back inside its housing and notched the strap into the tree bark and walked downhill to the cabin. The temperature seemed to drop without warning or transition, and she tried to remember if there had been mention of a cold front on the weather report. She removed a flashlight from a kitchen drawer, took her Airweight .38 from under her mattress, and put on a coat and a shapeless cowboy hat. When she returned to the hillside, the light had gone from the sky, the moon was rising, and she could barely make out the abandoned logging road that ran beneath the cave where Asa Surrette might have camped.

  She held the flashlight at eye level with her left hand, the Airweight in her right, and stepped onto the logging road. The air was dense and smelled of woodsmoke from a neighbor’s chimney. Down below she could see the lights inside Albert’s house and the shadows of the lilac bushes moving on the lawn. The wind shifted and began blowing out of the north, puffing the metal roof on the barn, scattering pine needles on the forest floor, filling the air with the cool smell of oxygen and humus and stone and lichen and toadstools that never see sunlight. She moved the flashlight beam through the trees that grew above the road and the cave. Where were the turkeys? Every night at sunset the entire flock, fifteen or so, went down to the creek in the north pasture and drank, then went back up the hill and roosted in tree limbs or around the trunks.

  Her eyes were watering in the wind. Then she smelled an odor that was like humus but much stronger, as though its presence were heavier than the wind, as though it were ubiquitous and had settled into the stone and the tree trunks and the ground and the pine needles that carpeted the slope. Some people said that was what a griz smelled like. A griz stank of the deer it killed and buried by its den in the autumn and the deer it ate and defecated after it awoke in the spring. It stank of rut and the excrement it slept in, the blood that had dried on its muzzle, the fish it had swatted out of a stream and devoured, guts and all. The odor she smelled now was all these things and so thick she thought she might swoon.

  “Are you there?” she said into the wind.

  Her chest rose and fell as she waited for a response. She closed her eyes and opened them. Nothing is out there, she told herself.

 
Hi, baby doll. You’ve been kicking some serious ass, haven’t you? a voice said.

  Her breath caught in her throat.

  You’re more like me than you think. Remember how their eyes beg? You can do anything you want with them. You have power that no one else of the earth has.

  “I’m nothing like you, you motherfucker,” she said.

  Sticks and stones.

  “Where are you?”

  Inside your head. In your thoughts. In all the secret places you try to hide who you really are. You can never get to me unless you kill yourself.

  “You don’t know me.”

  You’re not a person, Gretchen. You’re a condition. You enjoy killing. It’s like an orgasm or your first experience with China white. Once you taste of forbidden fruit, the addiction never goes away.

  “You’re not there.”

  Keep telling yourself that, little girl.

  “Show me your face.”

  This time there was no answer. She was sweating inside her clothes. She approached the mouth of the cave, then stopped and tried to breathe as slowly as possible. She stepped in front of the opening, the flashlight shining inside, the Airweight pointed straight out in front of her. She could see the scorch marks of a fire on the walls and the ceiling, and the fresh droppings of bats and pack rats on the ledges and in the ash, but no sign of human habitation. The odor inside the overhang made her think of a dead incinerator in winter.

  She backed out of the cave, into the wind, and clicked off the flashlight. “If you’re Asa Surrette, give me a sign,” she said.

  She counted off five seconds, then ten, then twenty. She felt as though someone had looped a piece of baling wire around her head and inserted a stick in it and was twisting it tighter and tighter.

  “I’m stronger than you,” she said. “So is Alafair and so is Albert Hollister and so is my father. You murder children.”

  The moon was high enough to light the tips of the trees, and she began to walk farther up the logging road, her eyes on the parklike slope of the hill. She thought she saw an animal running through the timber, just below the crest, its black fur threaded with silver. Its shoulders and forequarters were sinuous and heavily muscled, and it thudded solidly against the earth when it jumped over a broken tree, never interrupting its stride or momentum.