Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  Clete got the call on his cell phone early Saturday morning, while he was eating breakfast at the McDonald’s in Lolo. “Did I wake you up?” she said.

  “No,” he replied. “But whatever it is, I don’t think it’s too cool we see each other.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “About what?”

  “It’s Caspian. I always knew he had problems, but this is different. I can see it in his eyes. He’s involved with something really bad.”

  “Can you be a little more specific?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe it has to do with gambling. He used to lose tens of thousands a night until Love made him go to Gamblers Anonymous.”

  “What, he’s flying to Vegas or something?”

  “No, he’s scared about something. He went to meet someone yesterday and came home drunk. Caspian never drinks.”

  “Who’d he meet?”

  “He won’t say. I heard him talking to Love in the den. He asked if there was a hell.”

  Clete got up from the booth and went outside with the phone. A semi was making a wide turn onto the two-lane highway that led up the long grade to Lolo Pass and the Idaho line. “My daughter had just gotten off the plane that crashed west of Missoula two days ago,” he said. “The pilot was a member of the Sierra Club. My daughter is making a film about the oil companies that want to drill next to Glacier Park.”

  “You think the plane was sabotaged?”

  “What’s your opinion?”

  “Love Younger doesn’t blow up planes.”

  “I didn’t say he did.”

  “Caspian? He wouldn’t know a can of 3-In-One from Spindletop.”

  “I got the impression his father had a way of rubbing his nose in it.”

  “I need to see you.”

  He took the phone away from his ear and looked at the truck shifting down for the long pull up the grade. Don’t do it, a voice said. You can’t help her. She married into the Younger family of her own free will.

  “Are you there?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “I know you have every reason to distrust me. But I’m telling you the truth. There is something truly evil happening in our lives.”

  “Where are you?” he asked.

  “Not far. We have a camp on Sweathouse Creek.”

  “I got to ask you something. Your husband came to our place and said some ugly things. Did you know the governor of Louisiana, the one who went to prison?”

  “I met him once at a political event. Why?”

  “Your husband said you got it on with him.”

  “That’s because my husband is paranoid and a liar.”

  His head was bursting. He let out his breath, widening his eyes, unable to sort out his thoughts. “He said you were a trophy hunter.”

  “Believe what you want. Caspian is a sick, sad man. I’m afraid, and I need help.”

  He hesitated, his head throbbing. “Give me directions,” he said.

  THE CABIN WAS built of field stones on a whiskey-colored, tree-shaded creek at the base of the Bitterroot Mountains. The smoke from the chimney flattened in the breeze and disappeared inside the blueness of a canyon that didn’t see full sunlight until midday. Sometimes there were bighorn sheep high up on the cliffs of the canyon, and in the fall, the sky would have the radiance and texture of blue silk and be filled with red and yellow leaves blowing from a place on the mountaintop that no one could see.

  Clete thought about all these things as he parked the Caddy and walked up on the wood porch of the cabin and knocked, his heart beating hard.

  She had a hairbrush in her hand when she opened the door. “You found it okay?” she said.

  “I fish down here a lot. Dave and I fish here together. It’s always cool in the summer. One time in the fall, I backpacked way up that trail and saw a moose.”

  Her eyes went past him, then came back on his. She touched the hair on her neck with the brush. “Your car looks like you just had it waxed.”

  He turned around and looked at it as though observing it for the first time, wondering if the disingenuous nature of their conversation was as embarrassing to her as it was to him. “I just got it out of the shop. It got shot up when this guy from Kansas tried to kill my daughter. You want to sit out here?”

  “No, come in. What did you say? A man from Kansas?”

  “He was driving a truck with a Kansas tag. Maybe he’s Asa Surrette.”

  “The psychopath that Mr. Robicheaux’s daughter interviewed in prison?”

  “Yeah, he’s a bad guy. You told me you were afraid. What are you afraid of?”

  She looked beyond him at an old red boxcar that lay desiccated and half-filled with rotting hay inside a grove of cottonwoods. “I don’t know what I’m afraid of. I feel a sense of loss I can’t get rid of. I think about Angel and how she died and what the killer probably did to her before he put a plastic bag over her head. I can’t get those images out of my mind. I hate my husband. I’d like to kill him.”

  “Why?”

  “Will you come in, please?”

  He stepped inside. She closed the door behind him and turned the key in an old-fashioned lock. Then she went to the windows and pulled the curtains closed.

  “Who do you think is out there?” he asked.

  “I can’t be sure. Caspian is afraid of someone. More so than I’ve ever seen him. When he’s afraid, he’s cruel.”

  “To you?”

  “To anyone. I never knew a coward who wasn’t cruel. I had to make him bathe. No, I had to get Love to make him bathe.”

  “I’m losing the picture here.”

  “He wouldn’t take a bath or get in the shower. I told him I didn’t want him in our bedroom. Maybe he’s depressed. When people get depressed, they behave like that, don’t they?”

  “Depressed over your daughter’s death?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t think.” She sat down at a wood table, the hairbrush still in her hand. There was a vase of cut flowers on the table and another one on the kitchen windowsill. Her face looked freshly made up, her mouth glossy with lipstick that was too bright for her complexion, the streaks of brown in her hair full of tiny lights. “Nothing makes sense to me. Did this man Surrette kill our daughter?”

  “Evidently, nobody saw her leave the Wigwam. Would she leave with somebody she didn’t know?”

  “She was seventeen. A girl that age has no judgment.”

  He sat down across from her. “Had she ever gone off with guys she didn’t know?”

  “I tried to talk her into going to Alateen. She wouldn’t do it. Sometimes she’d come home at ten P.M. Sometimes she’d get dropped off at ten the next morning.”

  “Would she go off with strangers, Felicity?”

  “Not to my knowledge.”

  “Who were her friends?”

  “Druggies, boys on the make, kids who wanted access to her money.”

  “Was she promiscuous?”

  “Today they all are,” Felicity replied.

  Clete looked around the cabin. The walls were pine, the floors constructed from railroad ties, the stone fireplace outfitted with steel hooks for cook pots. “What do y’all use this place for?”

  “Hunting during big-game season. When Angel was younger, she had her friends out. We had ice cream parties on the bank of the stream.”

  “Were Caspian and your daughter close?”

  “I don’t know who Caspian is anymore.”

  “Pardon?”

  “When I met him, he was a different person. He had a brilliant mind for figures. He wanted to create a high-tech company and compete in the defense industry. He borrowed a half million dollars in start-up money from Love. Then he started gambling in Vegas and Atlantic City and Puerto Rico. Here’s the funny part. At the blackjack tables, he could count cards coming out of a six-deck shoe. He got banned from several casinos. Then they caught on to what he was doing.”

  “I don’t understand. You said they caught on to him
after he was banned.”

  “They realized if they let him stay at the table, he would lose everything he had won and drop ten to thirty thousand on top of it. How sick is that?”

  “That’s why they do it,” Clete said.

  “Do what?”

  “That’s why they gamble. They want to lose. They like to punish themselves. They want to feel there’s a cosmic plot working against them. Go into the bar at the track after the seventh race. It’s full of losers. They’re happy as hogs rolling in slop.”

  She stared at him blankly. “I feel like an idiot.”

  “Because you never figured out your husband?”

  “Because I married him.”

  “My ex gave our savings to an alcoholic Buddhist guru in Boulder,” Clete said. “This guru made people take off their clothes at poetry readings. My ex thought he was a holy man and I was a drunk cooze hound. Unfortunately, in my case, she was right.”

  Felicity propped her elbow on the table and rested her chin on her hand. For the first time since he had come into the room, she smiled. “You always talk like that to women?”

  “Only the ones I trust.”

  Had he just said that?

  “Why should you trust me?”

  “Because we both grew up in the same part of New Orleans. Because everybody from Uptown knows what everybody else there is thinking. It’s probably like an A.A. meeting. There’s only one story in the room. We all come out of the same culture.”

  The fear she had described seemed to have lifted momentarily from her soul. There was a warm light in her eyes. Her hair had the tone and variations of color you see in old hand-rubbed mahogany. “When you talk, you make me feel good,” she said.

  “I’m an overweight former homicide roach, Miss Felicity. I’m still persona non grata at NOPD. That’s like being a top sergeant in the Crotch, then getting your stripes pulled. Dave Robicheaux sobered up and got his life back. I never could pull it off. Three days without a drink, and my head turns into a concrete mixer.” He could see her attention fading, the fear and concern creeping back into her face. “I got a bad habit,” he said. “I start talking about myself and put everybody to sleep.”

  She touched the top of his hand. “No, you’re a nice man. I mentioned something about Caspian that you wouldn’t have a way of understanding. He asked Love if he believed in hell. Caspian has never had any interest in religion. Why would he ask Love a question like that?”

  Clete shook his head. “Guilt?”

  “If Caspian ever felt guilt about anything, I never saw it. He’s the most selfish human being I’ve ever known.”

  The kitchen window was open, and the curtains were blowing in the breeze. They were printed with small pink roses and made Clete think of the flower bed that his mother kept behind their small house in the old Irish Channel. “I think I’d better go,” he said. “I have a way of getting into trouble, Felicity. Lots of it. The kind that doesn’t go away and leaves people messed up for a long time.” The disappointment in her face was not feigned. He was sure of that, or at least as sure as he ever was when it came to matters of the heart. He got up to leave.

  “Do what you need to do,” she said.

  He nodded and walked to the door and tried to turn the key in the lock.

  “Here, I’ll get it,” she said. She twisted the key and opened the door, her shoulder brushing against his arm. She turned her face up to his. He could feel his manhood flare inside him. Her mouth was like a rose, her hair blow-dried and so thick and lovely that he wanted to tangle his fingers in it. “Clete?” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “You like me, don’t you?”

  “Do I? I’ve got a fire truck driving around inside my head.”

  “My daughter and my father are dead. I don’t have anyone.”

  She let her arms hang at her sides and leaned her forehead directly into his chest, as though in total surrender to him and the level of failure that characterized her life.

  One hour later, as he lay beside her, all his good intentions gone and his sexual energies exhausted, he thought about a story he had read as a boy in the old city library on St. Charles. The story was about Charlemagne and Roland on their way to Roncevaux. He wondered if they and their knights ever gave heed to the horns echoing off the canyon walls that surrounded them, or if they galloped onward through the cool blueness of the morning, beside a tea-colored stream, inside the rhythmic sweep of the wind in the trees, never realizing that the littered field began with a romantic quest, one that was as inviting and lovely and addictive as the grace to be found inside a woman’s thighs.

  I HAVE NEVER LAID strong claim on rationality, in fact have often felt that its value is overrated. Let’s face it, life is easier if we maintain a semblance of reasonable behavior and hide some of our eccentricities and not say more than is necessary in our dealings with others. The same applies to our actions. Why attract attention? No one takes an accordion band to a deer hunt.

  Like most people, I wonder why I don’t take my own advice.

  The cave behind Albert’s house began to bother me. Had it provided shelter to Asa Surrette? Was the perversion of Scripture on the wall of no consequence? Was it not a hijacking of a Judeo-Christian culture on which most of our ethos is based, in this instance a hijacking by a subhuman abomination who should have been hosed off the bowl thirty seconds after his birth?

  I found two empty wine bottles in Albert’s trash and filled them with gasoline I kept in a five-gallon can inside a steel lockbox welded to the bed of my pickup truck. I corked both bottles and carried them and the gas can up the hillside to the old logging road that traversed the mountain above Albert’s house. A doe with two fawns bounced through the trees ahead of me, flicking their tails straight up, the white underside exposed.

  The area around the cave entrance had remained undisturbed. Inside the overhang, I could see the message. I began heaping deadwood and leaves and pine needles and big chunks of a worm-eaten stump that was as soft and dry as rotted cork, shoving it against the wall that contained the pirated lines.

  I poured gasoline on the pile and set the can twenty feet from the cave opening, then lit a paper match and threw it inside the cave. The flame spread quickly over the fuel, climbing up the wall and flattening on the roof. Then I picked up the first wine bottle and flung it end over end into the fire. It broke against a fallen boulder and showered against the wall. Flames leaped from the cave, curling over the rim, scorching the overhang and singeing the grass and mushrooms that grew on top of it. I stepped back and tossed the second bottle inside. It landed on the deadwood and, seconds later, exploded from the heat rather than the impact. The fire was soon out of control, twisting in circular fashion, the flames feeding on themselves, spreading deeper into the cave, where there was probably a chimneylike opening drawing cold oxygen into the mixture of organic fuel and gasoline.

  I could feel the heat on my face and arms and smell a stench that was like the odor of pack rat nests burning. I heard a sound behind me and looked over my shoulder and saw Albert laboring up the hill, sweating, his flannel shirt open on his chest, a fire extinguisher swinging from his hand. “What in the Sam Hill are you doing?” he said, out of breath.

  “I thought I’d clean up the cave.”

  “Why didn’t you napalm the whole mountain while you were at it?” He pulled the pin on the extinguisher’s release lever and sprayed the rim of the cave, then the inside. Huge clouds of white smoke billowed from the opening and floated through the treetops. “You know how to do it, Dave. What’s got into you?”

  “I believe a genuinely evil man was up here, Albert. I believe he has no right to take language out of Scripture and deface the earth with it.”

  “Sit down a minute.”

  “What for?”

  “I want to talk to you.”

  I wasn’t up to one of Albert’s philosophic sessions. He’d had chains on his ankles when he was seventeen and had belonged to the Industrial Wor
kers of the World and had known Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston. He’d followed the wheat harvest from the Texas Panhandle to southern Alberta and had been on a freighter that hit a mine in the Strait of Hormuz. He was a charitable and fine man, and I held him in the highest regard. There were also times when he could drive you crazy and make you want to throttle him.

  “You were raised up in a superstitious culture,” he said. “When you let your imagination get the best of you, you start to see the devil’s hand at work in your life. The devil isn’t a man, Dave.”

  “Then what is he?”

  “Those goddamn corporations.”

  “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “You’re going to whether you like it or not. They bust our unions and use coolie labor in China and buy every goddamn president we elect.”

  “I can’t take this, Albert.”

  “Those men who tried to kill Miss Gretchen were working for somebody. Who would that be? Satan or Love Younger?”

  “A man like Younger doesn’t hire hit men.”

  “You don’t know your enemy, Dave. You never did.”

  “You want to translate that?”

  “How’d your father die?”

  “As the result of an accident. Don’t be using my old man in your polemics.”

  He placed his hand on my shoulder. “All right, I won’t. But don’t hurt yourself like this. The enemy is flesh and blood, not a creature who wears a pentacle for a hat.”

  I took the extinguisher and finished spraying the cave and the bushes around the entrance. “Better come have a look,” I said.

  “What is it?” he said, getting to his feet.

  “Check out the wall.”

  He stood at the entrance, the smoke from the ash rising into his face, his eyes watering. “It’s an aberration caused by the heat,” he said.