Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  His mouth opened even wider, as though he were unable to control his level of shock. “I am completely blown away. I have traveled this great nation from coast to coast and have stood in the arena among the great heroes of our time. I am awed and humbled to be in the presence of a lawman such as yourself. Even though I am only a simple rodeo cowboy, I stand and salute you, sir.”

  He rose from the stool, puffing out his chest, his body rigid as though at attention, his stiffened right hand at the corner of his eyebrow. “God bless you, sir. Your kind makes me proud of the red, white, and blue, even though I am not worthy to stand in your shadow, in this lowly barroom on the backstreets of America, where men with broken hearts go and the scarlet waters flow. The likes of Colin Kelly and Audie Murphy didn’t have nothing on you, kind sir.”

  People were staring at us, although he took no notice of them.

  I said, “You called my daughter ‘girl’ and ‘sweet thing.’ You also made a veiled threat about seeing her down the track. Don’t ever come near us again, Mr. Dixon.”

  His eyes wandered over my face. His mouth was down-hooked at the corners, his skin taut as pig hide, the dimple in his chin clean-shaven and shiny, perhaps with aftershave. He glanced through the front window at a sheriff’s cruiser pulling into the parking lot. The moral vacuity of his profile reminded me of a shark’s when it passes close to the glass in an aquarium.

  “Did you hear me?” I said.

  “That 911 deputy ain’t gonna find nothing in my truck, ’cause there ain’t nothing to find,” he said. “You asked if I was inside. I got my head lit up with amounts of electricity that make you glad for the rubber gag they put in your mouth. Before you get your nose too high in the air, Mr. Robicheaux, your daughter asked me if that ‘fucking arrow’ was mine. She talked to me like I was white trash.”

  He sat back down and began eating his sandwich again, swallowing it in large pieces without chewing or drinking from his soda, his expression reconfiguring, like that of a man who could not decide who he was.

  I should have walked away. Maybe he wasn’t totally to blame. Maybe Alafair had indeed spoken down to him. Regardless, he had tried to frighten her, and there are some things a father can’t let slide. I touched him on the shoulder, on the pattern of white stars sewn onto the fabric. “You’re not a victim, partner,” I said. “I’m going to pull your jacket and see what you’ve been up to. I hope you’ve been on the square with us, Mr. Dixon.”

  He didn’t turn around, but I could see the rigidity in his back and the blood rising in his neck like the red fluid in a thermometer.

  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, par
ticularly 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 c
aught 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.