Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  IF YOU ARE a parent, you know the following to be true: Even though your child has grown into adulthood, you never see the man or the woman; you see only the little boy or the little girl.

  Whenever I looked at Alafair, I saw the little El Salvadoran girl I pulled from a submerged plane that went down in the salt by Southwest Pass. I saw a little girl I called Alf who wore a Donald Duck cap with a quacking bill and a T-shirt with a smiling whale named Baby Orca and tennis shoes embossed with the words LEFT and RIGHT on the respective toes. The image of that little El Salvadoran girl will always hover before me like a hologram.

  Why get into that now? Because all of the events I have narrated started with an attack upon Alafair’s person while she was jogging on the hill below Albert Hollister’s ranch. Somehow the fact that her attacker may have been Asa Surrette had fallen through the cracks.

  Did Asa Surrette survive the crash of the prison van into the gas truck, then hook up with a fellow predator and come to Montana in pursuit of Alafair? It was possible. But Emile Schmitt did not have that kind of history and had been on retainer by law firms that represented members of the Mafia. The Mob is many things, but it doesn’t hire serial predators to look out for its interests.

  Let me make a confession. I would like to say I became a police officer with the NOPD in order to make the world a better place. I became a cop in order to deal with a black lesion that had been growing on my brain, if not my soul, since I was a child. My parents embarked upon the worst course human beings are capable of: They destroyed their home and their family and finally themselves. If there is any greater form of loss, I do not know what it is. It stays with you every day of your life; you wake with it at dawn and carry it with you into your nocturnal hours. There is no respite or cure, and if your experience has been like mine, you have accepted that only death will separate you from the abiding sense of nothingness you wake with at the first touch of light on the horizon.

  A man named Mack ruined my mother, and she helped turn my father, Big Aldous, into a sad, bewildered, raging alcoholic who once wrecked Antlers Pool Room and tore up seven Lafayette police officers with his bare fists. I had no feeling about the Vietcong or the NVA, but I put Mack’s face on every enemy soldier I killed. When I came back home, I rented an apartment in the French Quarter and slept with a .45 under my pillow, a round in the chamber, not in fear but in hope that someone would try to break in.

  Please forgive my obsession. My own story isn’t important. The story of the human condition is. If you see your natal home destroyed, one of two things will happen: You will let the loss of your childhood continue to rob you of all happiness for the rest of your life, or you will build a family of your own, a good one, made up of people you truly love and in whose company you are genuinely happy. If you are unlucky, born under a dark star, violent men will ferret their way into the life of your family and re-create the act of theft that ruined your childhood. From that moment on, you will enter a landscape that only people who have stacked time in the Garden of Gethsemane will understand.

  You will discover that the portrayal of law enforcement on television has nothing to do with reality. Chances are, you will be on your own. Perhaps you will find out that the suspected perpetrator has been released on bail without your being notified. The detective assigned to your case might do his best, but you will sense he is drowning in his workload and not always happy to see you. Your phone calls will go unanswered. You will become a nuisance and begin to talk incessantly about your personal problems, to strangers as well as friends. When you think it’s all over, you may receive a taunting call from the person who raped or murdered your loved one.

  Sound like an exaggeration? Dial up someone who has been there and see what he has to say.

  I remember sitting naked and ninety-proof in an Orleans Parish holding cell, flexing my hand, my body running with sweat, as I watched the veins swell in my forearm while I fantasized about a man I was going to kill as soon as I was released. The target of my anger was a Mafia boss I normally referred to as a three-hundred-pound load of whale shit whose name wasn’t worth remembering. I changed my mind when one of his gumballs shot my half brother, Jimmie, in the head and blinded him in one eye. That was when I decided to get back on that old-time lock-and-load rock and roll and turn a certain Mafia boss into wallpaper. At the time I thought and did these things, I was a police officer sworn to protect and serve.

  Now I felt great shame at having doubted Alafair’s conviction about Asa Surrette surviving the wreck of the prison van. I felt I had not only let down my daughter, I had joined the ranks of deadbeat cops who turn a cynical ear to those who need and deserve help the most.

  When we returned to Albert’s ranch from the mortuary, I made three calls to Kansas. The people there are among the best on earth, but bureaucracy is bureaucracy wherever you go. I’ve always suspected bureaucracy serves an ancillary purpose in the same way the human body absorbs an infection and prevents it from getting to the brain. Bureaucracy protects the people in charge from accountability. My efforts on the phone with the Kansas officials were beyond worthless. I was left with the impression that I had just conducted three separate conversations with a grain elevator.

  I went out on the deck and sat on a chair in the sunshine, surrounded by huge pots of purple and blue and pink petunias, the wind ruffling the flowers. Molly came out and sat beside me. “Don’t let it get to you,” she said.

  “Talking to people with CYBS?”

  “What’s CYBS?”

  “Cover-your-butt syndrome.”

  “You think it’s Surrette?”

  “It’s somebody who’s pure evil.”

  “You think he killed Bill Pepper?”

  “He didn’t just kill him.”

  She waited for me to go on.

  “You don’t want to hear the details, Molly. Whoever killed Pepper was a monster. Surrette may be one of the worst serial killers in American history. He’s cruel to the bone. I don’t want to tell you what he did to the children he murdered.”

  “Don’t talk about it anymore.”

  “I want to kill him.”

  “You can’t carry around those kinds of thoughts. It’s like drinking poison.”

  “It’s the way I feel. If he gets his hands on Alafair, she’s going to die a terrible death.”

  “Stop it, Dave.”

  I clenched my hands on my knees, stiffening my arms. In the distance, I could see Alafair’s Honda coming up the dirt road, driving faster than was her custom.

  “Did you hear me?” Molly said.

  “I’ve dealt with only one other man like Surrette. Remember Legion Guidry?”

  “I remember what you said about him. When he was an overseer, he sexually abused black women in the fields.”

  “What else did I say about him?”

  “I disregarded that, Dave. I don’t believe we should think of our fellow human beings in those terms, no matter how bad they are.”

  “I told you I thought he might be the devil. He had a smell about him like none I ever smelled on a human being.”

  She got up from her chair. “I love you, but I won’t listen to this.”

  I sat for what seemed a long time in the chair without moving. When Alafair turned under the arch into the driveway, I got up and walked down the steps and across the lawn to meet her. The back of my shirt was peppered with sweat in the wind, the flowers in Albert’s gardens bright with drops of water from the sprinklers. I wanted to gather Alafair in my arms and take her and Molly to a place ten thousand miles away, perhaps to an Edenic island on the Pacific Rim, like in the stories of Somerset Maugham and James Michener. But the canker in the rose is real, and Polynesian paradises long ago had been turned into cheap farms to supply the breadfruit fed to Caribbean slaves.

  Alafair got out of the car and walked toward me, her fingers holding a sheet of lined yellow paper by one corner. “This was under my windshield wiper when I came out of the post office,” she said.r />
  I got my handkerchief from my pocket and took the paper from her and read it. The message had been hand-printed with a felt-tip pen, each of the letters like a block or a cube, as stiff and linear as a hieroglyph. I could hear the wind coursing through the maples and the ornamental crab apple. Molly had followed me down from the deck and was looking over my shoulder. “What is it?” she said.

  “Read it,” I replied, holding the letter by the corners.

  “I don’t need to. Just tell me what it is,” she said.

  “Read it,” I repeated.

  Her eyes followed one line into the next, the blood draining from around her mouth.

  “Where are you going?” I said.

  “To get that goddamn do-nothing sheriff on the telephone,” she said.

  I wanted to laugh or at least to smile to take the tension and angst out of the moment. But humor was not an option. That’s the hold evil has upon us. There is nothing funny about the kind of evil represented by men like Asa Surrette or Legion Guidry. Charlie Manson was funny because he was so inept and cowardly, he had to use a collection of mindless vegetables to carry out his crimes. I was becoming convinced that creatures like Asa Surrette and my old antagonist Legion did not have human origins. They came from somewhere else. Where? you ask. I didn’t want to think about the possibilities.

  The letter read:

  Dear Alafair,

  It’s so good to be in touch with you again. Sorry to hear about Ms. Horowitz’s friend the weenie-boy who smacked into the mountain. It must be terrible knowing you’re going to crash and you can’t do anything about it. Oh well, he’s a crispy critter now. Poor little fag. Boo-hoo.

  Tell Ms. Horowitz she should stay out of the boys’ room or someone will think she’s not all girl.

  Are you still interested in doing a book on me? I think there’s enough material for a movie. I will tell you later who I would like to see cast in my role.

  As ever,

  A.

  WYATT DIXON HAD never been keen on picnics, at least not until Bertha Phelps called and invited him to go on one way up the Blackfoot Valley, a lovely spot she said she’d found on a drainage that flowed down through cottonwood trees into the river. When she met him at the bridge by his house, she was wearing a flowery sundress and a straw hat with a blue band and brand-new white tennis shoes that looked cute on her large feet. She was carrying a wicker basket loaded with cheese and cold cuts and potato salad and French bread from the deli, plus a half-gallon capped jar of homemade lemonade. “You put me in mind of this countrywoman who drove an ice cream truck out to the rural area where I growed up,” he said. “She had apples in her cheeks and smelled like peach ice cream. I asked her once if I could hide under her dress and run off with her.”

  “You have a way with words, Mr. Dixon. Are you telling me you like big women? I might be too big for you.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You’re trying to make me blush.”

  If she wanted to turn his head into a Mixmaster, she was doing a good job of it.

  They drove in his truck up the Blackfoot Valley and crossed a wood bridge and entered a wide alluvial landscape that seemed left over from the first days of creation. Wyatt shifted into four-wheel drive and clattered over a bed of white rocks and parked up on the slope and lifted the wicker basket out of the camper shell. “I declare, Miss Bertha, there must be thirty pounds of food in here,” he said.

  “You’re a nice gentleman in every way, Wyatt, but you must stop calling me ‘miss.’ We are not on the plantation,” she said.

  “I need to own up to something.” He folded his arms and looked at the ground, a strange tingling in his wrists that he didn’t understand. “I hope it don’t make you mad.”

  “You know what the problem is? You’re not used to sharing your feelings. How could anyone get mad on a lovely afternoon like this?” She gazed at a towering cliff on the far side of the river and at the thickness of the pines on the top. “In a place like this, we shouldn’t have a care in the world.”

  “I went out to Love Younger’s place and had some words with him. I asked if you worked for him. He didn’t have no idea who you were. I was glad.”

  “Why would I be angry about that?”

  “I doubted your word.”

  “Spread the blanket while I make our sandwiches. Tell me about your life in the rodeo.”

  He shook his head. “You’re an educated woman. Why are you interested in a man such as myself?”

  “Mine to know.”

  “There’s people here’bouts who’d take a shithog to church before they’d invite me on a picnic. It’s not adding up for me.”

  “Maybe I like you. Did you think of that?”

  Wyatt rubbed his wrists, his facial skin as smooth and expressionless as clay, his eyes following an osprey gliding low over the river. “I don’t let people use me,” he said. “I just walk away from them. In the past I did a whole lot worse than that.”

  “Someone has taught you that a good woman would never be attracted to you,” she said. “Someone did you a great wrong.”

  “I ain’t good at this. That’s a pretty dress. It looks like it come from a florist.”

  She was making the sandwiches on the tailgate of his truck. She turned her head toward him and smiled, her face lighting in a way that made something drop inside him. “You’re one of the most interesting men I have ever met. I think one of the nicest, too.”

  “You got a way about you that ain’t ordinary. You’re a powerful woman.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean.”

  “You don’t let men push you around. It’s something a man senses. It’s what men admire in a woman most.”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  The river was wide and flat here, the grass tall and green on both banks of the river, the slopes heavily wooded near the base of cliffs that were gray and smooth and rose straight up into the sky. Why did he feel enclosed, almost suffocated, by either his situation or the feelings churning inside him? Behind her, he could see a white-tailed buck on the edge of the timber, the points of his antlers curled and sharp and hard-looking in the light. There was not a house or a soul in sight. He looked at Bertha, then let his eyes slide off her face. “You’ve been hiding something. I need to know what it is,” he said.

  “I thought you might be a bad man. You’re not. There’s a deep sense of goodness in you, that somebody tried to take away from you.”

  “That ain’t true. Nobody’s ever taken anything away from me. They know better than to try.”

  “You consider yourself saved, don’t you?”

  “I don’t take nothing for granted. The state shot my head full of electricity and made me drink a bathtub-load of chemicals. Sometimes I think I hear my brain gurgling.”

  “Fix us some lemonade. It’s so pleasant out here. When I come to a place like this, I stop thinking about all my cares and worries. Smell the wind? I bet that’s what the world smelled like when this was a field of ice lilies.”

  “What cares and worries would a lady like you have?”

  “More than you know. But you’re not the source of them.”

  He removed his cowboy hat and set it on her head.

  “Why’d you do that?” she said.

  “It looks better on you than on me.”

  The entirety of her face seemed suffused with a pink loveliness that he never thought he would associate with a woman who had upper arms as big as hams. His hat slipped down on the corner of her eye. “Go ahead,” she said.

  “Go ahead what?”

  “Do whatever you’re fixing to do.”

  “I knew you were from the South.” He lifted his hat off her head and let it hang from his fingers behind her back while he kissed her on the mouth. Then he put his arms around her and did it again. She leaned back, still in his arms, and looked into his eyes, her stomach against his, her face glowing. “You feel like a stack of bricks,” she said. “Or maybe a leather bag full o
f rocks. Did anyone ever tell you that?”

  “Not recently.”

  “Your physique is very appealing, Mr. Dixon.”

  “It’s mighty bright out here in the sun. Can we take our blanket over yonder in the trees?”

  She blew out her breath. “Right here is lovely,” she said. “Oh, my heavens, what a marvelous afternoon. Hurry, now. Don’t be embarrassed. What finer place for love than the earth? That’s Robert Frost.”

  He didn’t catch that last part, but he didn’t really care. Congress with Bertha Phelps was not what he’d expected. Over the years most of his relationships with women had little to do with any consideration outside his skin. This time he felt he had stepped inside a rainbow. No, that wasn’t correct; it was more than that. Bertha’s sexual embrace of his body was like riding a winged horse or giving himself up to a cresting wave or swimming through warm water carpeted with flowers, and all the while she kept moaning his name in his ear. A few minutes later he felt a weakness shudder through his body and a dam break in his loins, and he held her tighter, more dependently, than he’d ever held a woman in his life, his breath coming hard in his throat, his head on her breast.

  Then he felt her stiffen under him and knew that something was terribly wrong. When he pushed himself up on his arms, her face was sweaty and white and disjointed with fear and surprise, her eyes fastened on someone standing directly behind him.

  HE LOOKED OVER his shoulder and saw not one but three men silhouetted against the sky, all wearing gloves and plastic masks that were a bright metallic gray and gave the impression of a weeping specter with a downturned mouth and cheeks pooled with shadow. One of the men was holding a police baton, a lanyard looped around his wrist. He stepped forward as though on cue and swung it across Wyatt’s ear, putting his shoulder into it, snapping it like a baseball batter connecting with a fat pitch.

  Wyatt suspected his eyes rolled but couldn’t be sure. The trees and mountains and sky suddenly reduced themselves to a pinpoint of light inside a sea of blackness, then the pinpoint disappeared, too. Wyatt fell sideways into the grass, naked except for his unsnapped cowboy shirt, a trickle of blood sliding down his neck.