Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  Her face and hands were cold, her shirt was ballooning, her ears were deafened by the wind stream and the roar of the engines. None of that mattered. Through the lens of the camera, she was capturing topography whose geological age could only be guessed at. Even when the train trestle sped by and she could smell the trees and the coldness of the snow down below and see a canyon wall approaching the plane, she never took her eye from the lens.

  She felt the plane lift violently, the engines shuddering, the wings stressing, as Percy took them along the edge of a cliff and over a mountain crest where the tips of the Douglas fir were probably no more than ten feet below the plane’s belly. Percy turned in to the sun and flew toward the plains, his hands opening and closing on the yoke. She sat back down in the seat and shut the window. “Thanks,” she said.

  “Thanks?”

  “Yeah, that was very nice of you.”

  “We came within about three seconds of pancaking into that cliff. Where have I heard that line ‘You’ve got to do something for kicks’?”

  “Rebel Without a Cause.”

  He smiled, his expression like a young boy’s. “You ever read a biography of Ernest Hemingway?”

  “Probably not.”

  “He used to say his third wife, Martha Gellhorn, had legs that were six feet long. That’s what you look like, Gretchen. You’re the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. On top of it, you’re a beautiful person.”

  “Maybe there are some things you don’t know about me. Maybe you shouldn’t be telling me about your feelings.”

  “Gay guys hit on you all the time?”

  “You’re gay?”

  “What did you think I am?”

  “A gorgeous man.” She got up on her knees and put her hand on the back of his neck and kissed him on the cheek. Then she did it again.

  “Jesus Christ, Gretchen.”

  “What?”

  “Cut it out or I’ll have to stop being gay,” he said.

  They landed on the rez at an airstrip mowed out of a pasture, a windsock at the far end straightening in the breeze. The sky was full of dust and pollen and chaff blowing from a field where a farmer was harrowing. It was a bleak place devoid of trees or shade, the ground studded with rocks, and tangles of mustard weed were bouncing across it like jackrabbits. At the crossroads was a general store with two gas pumps in front and a collapsed barn in back. One of the pumps had been vandalized and was powdered with rust. Gretchen looked at the sign over the door. It said DEER HEART ONE STOP.

  “You’ve been here before?” she said.

  “A couple of times. To gas up and hire a driver.”

  “Deer Heart was the name of a teenage girl who was murdered outside Missoula. She was the adopted granddaughter of Love Younger.”

  “That bastard adopts Indian kids?”

  “His son did. The one called Caspian.”

  “These people have enough trouble without the Youngers taking their kids. I wonder if there’s a curse on this country. You ever hear of the Baker Massacre?”

  “No.”

  “In 1870 an alcoholic army major by the name of Eugene Baker murdered two hundred and seventy Piegan Blackfeet up on the Marias River. Most of them were women and children. It was January, and the survivors were driven into freezing water or out on the plains to die. They hadn’t committed a crime against anyone. I know a wildlife photographer who camped on the Marias to take some pictures at sunrise and said he heard the sounds of women and children wailing in the wind. It scared him so bad he couldn’t start his truck.”

  “What’s the story on the Deer Heart family?”

  “There aren’t many good stories on the rez. Check out the jail in Browning on Saturday night.”

  A bell tinkled on the door when they went inside. The proprietor was an old man with steel-gray braids and blue eyes and skin that looked as soft as tallow. He said if they wanted to hire a car and a driver to tour and photograph the area, he would call his nephew, who lived a short distance away. Gretchen studied a framed photograph on the wall beside an ancient refrigerator. “Is this your family?” she asked.

  “That’s us, ten years back. Ain’t many of us still around,” the old man said. He was sitting on a stool behind the counter, surrounded by shelves of canned goods, his shoulders stooped.

  In the photo, several elderly people were standing under a picnic shelter. In front were a young couple and three small children. “Is Angel Deer Heart in this picture?” Gretchen asked.

  “You know Angel?” the old man said.

  “Just by name. She was adopted by the Younger family, wasn’t she?”

  “Her mother and father were killed on the highway north of Browning. They got drunk and went straight into a truck. The children were taken by the adoption agency. Angel is the only one left.”

  “Pardon?” Gretchen said.

  “I heard her brother and sister died of meningitis in a hospital in Minnesota. You heard something about Angel? Is she doing okay?”

  Gretchen didn’t answer.

  “We don’t want to take a lot of your time,” Percy said. “Can you call your nephew for us?”

  “If you ever see her, tell her to write home and tell her great-uncle Nap how she’s doing,” the old man said.

  Gretchen looked blankly at the canned goods on the shelves. She opened the refrigerator and took out two bottles of pop. “How much are these?” she said.

  “A dollar each,” he said. “Are you all right, miss?”

  “I get airsick sometimes,” she replied.

  She and Percy went out on the porch to wait for the nephew. A grass fire was crawling up a row of brown hills in the distance. The dust and smoke had turned the sunlight into pink haze, more like evening than morning. “You really think this place is haunted?” she said.

  “That’s what the Indians want to believe.”

  “Why should they want to do that?”

  “As bad as the past was, they were probably better off then,” he replied.

  A plane came out of nowhere and flew above the store and made a turn over the airstrip, then climbed into the smoke rising off the hills. “There’s our friend in the Cessna,” she said. “I think those are Love Younger’s people up there.”

  “Forget it. We’re on the right side of history,” Percy said, watching the plane grow smaller inside the smoke. He looked at her. “You don’t agree?”

  “The ovens at Auschwitz were full of people who were on the right side,” she said.

  IT WAS ALMOST sunset when they landed in Missoula. She was tired and dirty, her clothes smelling of smoke, her body stiff from sitting in the plane’s passenger seat without enough room for her legs. Percy was going to refuel and take off for Spokane, where he was supposed to meet his partner. “Can I buy you dinner?” he said.

  “I’m going to use the restroom and head home. Thanks for a great day.”

  “If I ever decide to cheat on my partner, could I give you a call?”

  “That’s not funny.”

  “I don’t think before I speak sometimes.”

  “Percy?”

  He waited. She looked at the youthfulness in his face, the moral clarity in his eyes, and wanted to tell him something but didn’t know what.

  “You worried about me?” he said.

  “Sometimes I think I’m a jinx. Is your plane okay?”

  “Did it seem okay when we flew through the canyon above the Marias?”

  “Take care of yourself. Call me on my cell when you get to Spokane.”

  “You’re a worrywart,” he said.

  Later, on her way to use the women’s room, she felt rather than saw a man standing at the corner of her vision, his eyes dissecting her. It was a sensation she could compare only with a spider crawling across her face in her sleep as she lay helpless inside a dream from which she couldn’t wake. She shifted the weight of her backpack from one shoulder to the other, her expression flat, turning her head slightly to get a look at a figure silhouetted aga
inst the entranceway.

  His face was shadowed by the sunlight shining through the front of the building. She pretended to study a stuffed grizzly bear in a giant showcase, its upraised paws and bared teeth looming above her. In the reflection of the glass, she watched the man walking toward the waiting room. She turned slowly and saw a late-middle-aged man about six feet, with a tapered waist and hair combed in ducktails like a 1950s hood’s. He wore an unpressed white shirt and Roman sandals and black socks and a cheap brown belt and rumpled slacks with dirt on the cuffs. A tobacco pipe was stuck through one of his belt loops. For just a moment she smelled an odor that didn’t belong inside an air terminal.

  Then she lost sight of him in the concourse. He had gone into either the men’s room or the lounge. She walked through a crowd in front of the souvenir store and stood at the entrance to the lounge and studied the people eating at the tables or drinking at the bar or playing the video poker machines. If he was in there, she didn’t see him.

  She waited in front of the men’s room for two minutes, then pushed the door open and went inside. A man at a urinal grinned at her. “One of us is in the wrong place,” he said.

  She dropped her backpack on the floor and put a hand inside her tote bag. “You see a rumpled-looking guy with a duck ass in back?”

  “A what?”

  “Zip up and get out.”

  A fat man came out of a stall, tucking in his shirt with his thumbs. “You, too,” she said. “Beat it.”

  “Who do you think you are?” the fat man asked.

  “I think there’s a bad guy in one of these stalls. Now get the fuck out, unless you want to catch a stray bullet,” she said.

  Both men rushed out, looking over their shoulders at her. She walked the length of the stalls but saw no feet under the doors. She began kicking open each door, slamming it back against the partition, the Airweight .38 special in her right hand.

  They were all empty. As she kicked open the last stall, an odor rose into her face that made her gag.

  She backed away from the stall and blew out her breath and dropped the Airweight in her tote bag just as the front door opened and a tall man in a Stetson entered the room.

  “Come on in. I went in the wrong room. I’m on my way out,” she said.

  “No problem,” he said. He cleared his throat loudly and pressed the back of his wrist against his mouth. “Good Lord!” he said.

  “Tell me about it,” she said. “You see a guy in Roman sandals with ducktails out there?”

  “Come to think of it, I did.”

  “Where?”

  “Going out the front. Is there something a little strange going on here?”

  She went back into the concourse, expecting to see security personnel heading toward her. The concourse, the souvenir shop, the waiting area, and the lines at the counters were as they had been when she entered the restroom.

  She went through the revolving door onto the sidewalk. The air was warm, the sun little more than a spark between the hills, the clouds in the west orange against a blue sky. She felt a wave of exhaustion wash through her. Was the man with the 1950s hairstyle the same one she had seen at the bar in the Depot, the same one who had tried to kill her below the Higgins Street Bridge?

  Was the abominable odor in the men’s room his? Was she losing her mind? She was too tired to answer her own questions. She started walking toward her pickup. Percy Wolcott’s twin-engine flew overhead into the sun’s afterglow, its propellers spinning with a silvery light, almost in tribute to the day. As the drone of the engines faded, she walked farther into the parking lot, the equipment in her backpack knocking against her side.

  Then she heard a sound that was like dry thunder, a rumbling that had no source, a reverberation that seemed to bounce off rock walls and the trunks of trees, as though magnifying itself, refusing to be gathered into the sky.

  She stared at the hills, dark with shadow on the slopes and lit from behind by clouds that were as orange as Halloween pumpkins. Don’t think those thoughts, she told herself. Do not look in his direction. Do not become the jinx you called yourself.

  Others in the parking lot were pointing toward the west. At what? How can you point at a sound? Before she could think about the denial in her question, she saw a fire burning inside the trees on a distant hill and a dark mushroom cloud rising from it.

  She thought of the twin-engine parked unguarded on the airstrip, the elderly Indian man in the general store, perhaps asleep behind the counter; a red Cessna circling above, radioing to someone else the location of Percy’s plane.

  She had to sit down on the bumper of a truck, her eyes tightly shut, to keep from losing her balance.

  THURSDAY MORNING, CLETE and I kept our word to the sheriff and drove Gretchen to identify the body his deputies had pulled out of the Clark Fork, west of town. It was obvious she couldn’t have cared less about the name of the dead man in the drawer at the mortuary. Her eyes roved over the bluish-white sheen on his refrigerated skin and the wounds in his head and throat and chest and side without seeming to register any of it.

  “You’ve never seen him before?” the sheriff said.

  “He’s the man I shot, if that’s what you’re asking,” she replied.

  “You never saw him before that?”

  “No.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Why would I say no if I meant something else?”

  “He worked out of Fort Lauderdale and Atlantic City. You spent most of your life in Miami. His name was Emile Schmitt. He was a PI and bail-skip chaser. He also worked for an armored car service. You’re not familiar with that name?”

  “No,” she said.

  “But you recognize him as the man you shot and killed?”

  “It was dark, but yes, I believe this is the man who tried to kill me and who I shot and killed, after giving him every chance to surrender. Is there something about the words that you don’t understand?”

  “You seem to have a built-in defense mechanism that kicks into gear whenever you’re asked a question,” the sheriff said.

  “I told you what occurred. You can characterize it in any fashion you like.”

  “The pickup truck driven by the other man trying to kill you was stolen from a farmer in Kansas. The farmer may have been murdered. Or maybe you already know that.”

  “Clete and Dave told me.”

  “Do you believe the driver could be Asa Surrette?”

  “How would I know who he is? Maybe I saw him last night in the airport.”

  “Would you repeat that?”

  “At the airport, I might have seen a guy who tried to hit on me at the Depot. Maybe he was the guy in the stolen truck. Maybe he was following me yesterday. My friend Percy Wolcott died in his plane last night, right after dropping me at the airport. Have you been to the site yet?”

  “That’s the jurisdiction of the National Transportation Safety Board. Let’s not change the subject. From what we could learn, Emile Schmitt’s clients as a PI included several attorneys who represent the Mafia in South Florida and New Jersey. I think you knew the same people. Except you claim to have no knowledge of this man, that your life and his intersected by coincidence in a small city in western Montana.”

  “I’m not making a claim about anything,” she said. “I’m telling you what happened. Percy’s plane was parked several hours on an airstrip east of Marias Pass. The airstrip was next to a general store owned by the great-uncle of Angel Deer Heart. Think that’s coincidence, Sheriff? I think somebody put a bomb on that plane and the timer went off late.”

  “I’m not making the connection.”

  “All of this has something to do with Angel Deer Heart. But your investigation never gets beyond an ex-convict rodeo clown.”

  The sheriff started to speak, but Gretchen cut him off. “Bill Pepper abducted me after he violated every inch of my body he could rub his dick on. If I could have gotten to him before someone else did, I would have clicked off his switch. So
would my father. We didn’t have the chance. If that doesn’t sit too good with you, go fuck yourself.”

  “You’re an angry woman, Ms. Horowitz, and sometimes angry women do irrational things.”

  I could hear Clete breathing through his nose, almost feel the heat radiating from his body. “Sheriff, this isn’t getting us anywhere,” I said.

  “Stay out of this, Mr. Robicheaux.”

  “No, sir, you’re out of line,” I said. “That crack was about as dumb a remark I ever heard an officer of the law make.”

  I could see pale spots in his face, his hand tightening on the edge of the drawer that contained the earthly remains of a man who, in death, had the significance of a doorstop. The sheriff’s discomfort was obvious. He knew he was wrong, and it was not a time to crowd the batter any more than I had.

  “Sheriff, you found the perpetrator’s semen on the body of Angel Deer Heart,” I said. “You went to the data bank for a match, right? What did you find out? Are we dealing with Asa Surrette or not?”

  “The specimen got lost,” he said, his face reddening.

  The only sound in the room was the hum of the refrigeration.

  “Bill Pepper?” I said.

  “I think he was drunk. Whatever he did with the specimen, we can’t find it.”

  “I have to ask you a question,” I said. “Why did you let a man like that stay on in your department?”

  “At one time he was a good cop. When his marriage went south, he started drinking. Maybe you’ve never had problems like that. I have. So I gave him a chance. I wish I hadn’t. I apologize to Ms. Horowitz for the remark I made. But I’ll be damned if I’m going to have gunfights in the streets of my city. And nobody is going to show disrespect for my office, either.”

  Fair enough, I thought. He’s not a bad guy. Time to boogie and leave others to their own destiny. Err on the side of charity and let disengagement become a virtue.

  “I heard Percy Wolcott’s plane explode. Not crash. Explode,” Gretchen said. “Forget the apology, Sheriff. Then pull your head out of your ass and do your job for a change.”