Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  “I’ll keep all this in mind.”

  He took a penknife from his watch pocket and pared one of his fingernails. “You don’t hang out with rodeo people?” She winked at him and didn’t reply. He gazed at the sunlight breaking on the tops of the trees. “Whatever you do, stay away from that cave up yonder.”

  “It’s just a cave,” she said.

  “Something is loose here’bouts, something that ain’t supposed to be here. I can smell it. That Indian girl that got killed?”

  “I heard about it.”

  “Her death was over something the cops ain’t figured out yet. She was from the Blackfeet rez, up somewhere east of Marias Pass. I called her Little Britches, ’cause she was such a little-bitty slip of a thing.”

  “You’ve lost me.”

  “You know the Younger family?”

  “Not personally.”

  “It’s got to do with them. And with that thing in the cave. I just ain’t ciphered it out yet. I’m working on it.”

  “Why?”

  “ ’Cause of what got done to that little girl.”

  Gretchen flipped open the cylinder of her pistol and dumped the cartridges in her palm and put the cartridges and both guns and the ear protectors back in her canvas shooting bag. “Take care of yourself,” she said.

  “If you ever want to mess around with an older man, I’m available,” he said.

  “I’m not worth it. Keep your powder dry for the right girl,” she replied.

  He laughed under his breath. She walked down the hillside to the cabin, her gun bag looped over one shoulder, the wind scattering her chestnut hair on her cheeks and forehead. Wyatt Dixon stared after her, bareheaded, his features as chiseled as a Roman soldier’s. Then he stared up at the cave, his good humor gone, his eyes containing thoughts that no rational person would ever be able to read or understand.

  ON SUNDAY MORNING Molly and I went to Mass at a small church by the university. When we got back, Clete was standing on the porch of the guest cabin, waiting for me. “I found a bug,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “Above the door to Gretchen’s room.”

  “Have you told Albert?”

  “Yeah, he said, ‘What else is new?’ I’m going to get a guy out here to sweep the place.”

  “How long do you think it’s been there?”

  “There’s no way to tell. I’d say it’s state-of-the-art. We need to stop pretending, Dave.”

  “About what?”

  “Somebody has us in their sights. It started with somebody shooting an arrow at Alafair. Now both Gretchen and I are part of a homicide investigation. It’s time we take it to these cocksuckers.”

  “Have any idea who these cocksuckers are?”

  I thought he would give me a facile answer, but Clete was the most prescient cop regarding human behavior whom I ever knew. “I think we’re dealing with multiple players, maybe guys with different objectives. The best place to start is with the money. Always. Come inside. I want to show you some information I dug up.”

  For years he had chased down bail skips for two bondsmen named Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater. The conventional portrayal of a PI’s life is a romantic and noir excursion into a world of intrigue, with wealthy female clients swathed in veils and overweight villains sweating under a fan in a saloon on the Pacific Rim. The real world of a PI, and the clientele of Willie and Nig, could be compared to the effluent running through an open sewer. Anyone who thinks otherwise knows nothing about it. Criminality and narcissism are not interchangeable terms, but they are closely related. The checkbook of a narcissist or a recidivist is always balanced, but at someone else’s expense. With rare exceptions, anyone working on his second or third jolt is looking for an institutional womb. Most of them have no feeling about the pain they cause other human beings, either inside or outside the system. The culture of cruelty inside a prison makes you wonder if there is not a genetic flaw in all of us, like an embryonic lizard waiting to crack free from its shell.

  Clete hated his job. The NOPD pulled his shield in 1986, and ever since, he had tried to pretend that the loss of his career was of no consequence. Occasionally, I would see him bending over the lavatory in his office, his sleeves rolled up, his wristwatch on the edge of the basin, scrubbing Ajax into his pores, and there would be a level of regret and loss in his eyes that had nothing to do with the face Clete Purcel showed the world.

  Working for Wee Willie and Nig had one advantage only: They were anachronisms, but they knew everything about everyone in the city of New Orleans, at least everyone who went against the grain or was a half-bubble off or was part of a sybaritic culture that celebrated its own profligacy.

  “I told you Love Younger’s daughter-in-law, Felicity Louviere, was from New Orleans, didn’t I?” Clete said. “She grew up by the old Prytania Theatre. Not far from where I did. Did you know Lillian Hellmann grew up on Prytania?”

  “Yeah, I did,” I said, waiting for him to get to the point.

  “It’s the accent. That’s how I knew.”

  “Yeah, I got that. What I don’t get is why you’re homing in on her and not her husband or father-in-law.”

  “Give me some credit, Streak. The woman’s in grief. You think I’d try to put moves on her?”

  I let my eyes go empty. “No,” I said. But you’re a sucker for a woman who’s in trouble.

  “What was that?” he asked.

  “I said no, you wouldn’t take advantage of a woman who just lost a child, for God’s sake.”

  He gave me a look and picked up a handful of printouts sent to him through Albert’s computer by a reference librarian who worked for Willie and Nig. “Felicity Louviere’s old man was Rene Louviere. Remember him?”

  I remembered the name in the way you remember high school friends who never had a category, people who floated hazily on the edge of your vision and whose deeds, for good or bad, never seemed memorable. You may think of them with fondness, as compatriots with whom you shared a journey. You’re sure they were good at something, but never sure exactly what. “He was in the department for a while?” I said.

  “Yeah, for about three years. In community outreach, over by the Desire Project. He got canned for cutting too much slack to the local pukes. He was a nice guy. He just wasn’t a cop.”

  In my mind’s eye, I saw an indistinct image of a man who was too thin for his clothes and went a long time between haircuts and was uncomfortable with the coarseness common during morning roll call. “What became of him?”

  “He was a social worker in Holy Cross and got fired for giving welfare money to illegals. He ended up roughnecking in a rain forest in South America. Get this. The local Indians burned the bones of their dead relatives and mixed the ashes in the food to keep the family line going. They also shot blowguns at the Americans on the drilling rigs. Some geologists decided to do some payback and flew over the village in a single-engine plane and dropped a couple of satchel charges on them. They killed and wounded a bunch of people, including children.”

  He set the printouts on the breakfast table and pinched his eyes, a look of weariness if not soul sickness stealing into his face. I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t.

  “What is it, Clete?” I said.

  “You know the drill. The motherfuckers who start wars have never heard a shot fired in anger, but they wave the flag and make speeches at Arlington and run up the body count as high as they can. I hate them, every one of them.”

  I knew Clete was no longer talking about events in the rain forests of Brazil or Venezuela. He was back in the Central Highlands, on the edge of a ville that stank of duck shit and stagnant water, the flame from the cannon of a Zippo track arching onto the roofs of the hooches, a mamasan pleading hysterically in a language he couldn’t understand.

  “Finish the story, Clete,” I said.

  His eyes came back on mine. “Rene Louviere quit his job with the oil company in protest. He went back to the States and joined a reli
ef agency and returned to the ville the geologists had bombed. Guess what?”

  “Don’t tell me.”

  “A couple of Indians got wasted on mushrooms and chopped him into pieces.”

  “How did Felicity Louviere meet her husband?”

  “At a Mardi Gras ball. He probably didn’t tell her he got expelled from college for cheating. He’s also a degenerate gambler and had a hundred-grand credit line in Vegas and Atlantic City, until his father forced him into Gamblers Anonymous. Here’s the weird part: The guy supposedly has an incredible mind for figures. The reason he got comped in the casinos was because no matter how much he won, the house took it all back, plus the fillings in his teeth.”

  “You think Younger’s people put the bug above Gretchen’s door?”

  “They probably know she’s doing a documentary on Love Younger’s shale-oil projects in Canada. But . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Nobody cares about the damage these guys are doing, including the Canadians. Why spend money eavesdropping on us?”

  “Maybe they’re hiding something that has little or nothing to do with the environment.”

  “I don’t know what it is, and neither does Gretchen.”

  “There’s another possibility, Clete. I just don’t like to think about it.”

  “The guy up at the cave?”

  “Asa Surrette is the name.”

  “Dave, guys like this have a way of staying alive in our imagination long after they’re dead. Sometimes I still see Bed-check Charlie in the middle of the afternoon. He’s up on a rooftop, locking down on me through a scoped sight on a Russian rifle, just about to squeeze off a round. I feel like somebody is taking off my skin with a pair of pliers. What are the chances of Asa Surrette being the only survivor in a collision between a prison van and a gasoline truck?”

  “What are the chances this guy could torture and kill people in his hometown and go undetected for two decades?”

  Clete rubbed the back of his neck. “What do you know about him except he was active in his church?”

  “He was an electrician and sometimes installed burglar alarms in people’s homes,” I replied.

  He stared at me in the silence, his eyes lidless.

  SO FAR ONLY two people gave any credence to the possibility that Asa Surrette had escaped from a gasoline-tanker explosion in West Kansas or that someone like him had stenciled the message on the cave wall. One was Alafair and the other was Wyatt Dixon, a man who proved so uncontrollable in custody that the state had tried to short-circuit his brain. I had told the sheriff not to listen to Dixon’s quasi-psychotic ravings. But I was wrong. Dixon was con-wise. He had information and levels of experience that other people couldn’t guess at. He was also the kind of guy you enlist in your cause if you want to win a revolution.

  The discrepancy between the real world and how the world is reported by the media is enormous, and I’ve always believed this is why most newspeople drink too much. People like Wyatt Dixon understand how Frankenstein works and speak in metaphors that come out of their experience. Unfortunately, most of them have fried their SPAM, and their symbols and frame of reference don’t make much sense to the rest of us.

  I grew up in the Deep South in an era when institutional cruelty was a given. I have never met one person in normal society who would admit knowledge of the cast-iron sweatboxes on Camp A in Angola Penitentiary. Nor have I met anyone who wasn’t shocked when I mentioned that there are more than a hundred convicts buried in the prison levee along the Mississippi River. Normal people will tell you they have never known a criminal, although they have sat in church pews next to slumlords, zoning board members on a pad, and defense contractors who have contributed to the death of thousands of human beings.

  Here’s the biggest joke of all: Wyatt Dixon was probably a genuine believer. He may not have believed in God, but no one could deny he hadn’t been on a first-name basis with the devil. Maybe that’s a pathetic cachet, but as Clete would say, who’s perfect?

  Where do you go on a Sunday if you want to find a man like Wyatt Dixon? I saw Albert working in his flower bed and asked him. “There’s a holy roller meeting up on the rez this afternoon,” he replied. “You might try there.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “What do you want with Dixon?”

  “Information.”

  “The boy had a hard life. Don’t be too rough on him.”

  “Dixon doesn’t impress me as a victim.”

  “That’s because you don’t know anything about him. You loved your parents and your parents loved you, Dave. Dixon didn’t have that kind of luck.”

  “You’re a good man, Albert.”

  “That’s what you think,” he replied.

  THE HOLY ROLLER MEETING was held at a pavilion on the Flathead Indian Reservation not far from the Mission Mountains. It involved what people down south call dinner on the ground and sometimes devil in the bush. At five P.M. Clete and I drove in the Caddy up a long grade through wooded hills that were a deep green from the spring rains into a valley that rose higher and higher as the road progressed toward Flathead Lake. The sky was clear and blue, and fresh snow had fallen on the tops of the Missions during the night; in the sunlight, you could see the ice on the waterfalls melting. The mountains were so massive, the rock chain they formed against the sky so vast, that you lost perspective and the forests growing up the sides resembled green velvet rather than trees. It was one of those places that seemed to reduce discussions about theology to the level of folly.

  The service was almost over when Clete parked the Caddy in a pasture lined with rows of cars and pickup trucks. Someone had extended a huge vinyl canopy from the pavilion over the grass, where at least a hundred people were seated in folding chairs, listening to a minister preach into a microphone. The sunlight looked like hammered bronze on the surface of the Jocko, the wind cutting serpentine lines through the fields, the canopy ballooning and popping overhead. The work-worn faces of the congregants were like those you would expect to see in Appalachia, the eyes burning with a strange intensity, and either awe or puzzlement or vulnerability, that reminded me of the paintings of Pieter Brueghel’s Flemish peasants.

  The real show wasn’t the preacher. When it was time to give witness, he paused and held on to the sides of the podium, lifting his chin, sucking in his cheeks, his mouth puckered, as though he were teetering on the bow of a ship bursting through the waves. “Paul and Silas bound in jail!” he called out.

  “That old jailhouse reeled and rocked all night long!” the congregation shouted.

  “Hebrew children in the fiery furnace all night long!” the preacher shouted.

  “Lord, who will deliver poor me?” the congregation shouted back.

  “There’s worse bondage than the jail. It’s bondage of the spirit,” the preacher said. He pointed his finger into the crowd. “There’s a man here gonna give witness to that, too. A man who had to be struck dumb in order to speak, and by heavens, each of you knows who I’m talking about. Come on up here, Wyatt.”

  “These people vote in elections,” Clete whispered.

  “Be quiet,” I said.

  Dixon faced the crowd, his eyes close-set, the sleeves of his cowboy shirt rolled above his elbows, the veins in his forearms pumped with blood. Then I witnessed the strangest transformation I had ever seen take place in a human being. He looked briefly at the canopy rippling and snapping in the wind, then his mouth went slack and his eyes rolled up into his head. He began to speak in a language I had never heard. The syllables came from deep down in the throat and sounded like wood blocks knocking. He held his arms straight out from his sides, as though about to levitate. I would like to be able to say his performance was fraudulent, nothing more than a manifestation of tent-show religious traditions that go back to colonial times. Except the glaze in his face was not self-manufactured, nor was the energy that seemed to surge through his body as though he had laid his hand on a threadbare power line. Had I be
en a neurologist, I probably would have concluded he was having a seizure. I was not alone in my reaction. The congregation was transfixed, some pressing their hands to their mouths in fear. When Dixon finished his testimony, if that’s what it could be called, there was dead silence except for the wind popping the canopy.

  Dixon balanced himself on the side of the podium, his pupils once again visible, a crooked smile on his face, like a man who was sexually exhausted and trying to recover perspective. Clete screwed a cigarette into the corner of his mouth and flipped open his Zippo.

  “Are you crazy?” I said under my breath.

  “You think these guys are paying any attention to us?” he replied.

  “I don’t care. Show some respect.”

  He slipped the cigarette back into his shirt pocket. “Check out the broad in the last row.”

  She was wearing a hat and dark glasses, but there was no mistaking the creamy white skin and the mole by her mouth and the demure posture. “What is Felicity Louviere doing here?” I said.

  “Maybe she thinks Dixon was mixed up in her daughter’s death.”

  “You see the husband anywhere?”

  “He’s probably getting laid.”

  “We don’t even know the guy. Why be so critical?” I said.

  “He’s a piece of shit, and you know it.”

  We were standing at the back of the crowd. A fat woman in a print dress with lace on the sleeves turned around and stared at us. “Sorry,” I said.

  “Here comes our man,” Clete said. “I hope you’re up to dealing with this crazy bastard.”

  “Clete, will you stop it?” I said.

  Dixon worked his way through the congregants while they folded and stacked their chairs, returning congratulations, shaking hands, even though his eyes never left our faces.

  “I declare, it’s Mr. Robicheaux, fresh up from the bayou,” he said. “Or is it a swamp or a cesspool and such as that where you live at?”

  “More like an open-air mental asylum. Is that Aramaic you were speaking?” I said.