Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  “Sir?” I said.

  “When I look at Caspian, I always see the little boy, not the man. I don’t know if you’ve had that experience. He was always a little-bitty chap tagging along after the others. He’d have his elbows poked out, like a rooster that wants to fight. When he was about nine or ten, I took him to visit the hollow where I grew up. The kids there went barefoot in the snow and were meaner than spit on a church wall. Caspian wanted to pretend he was as tough as these poor little ragamuffins. He’d say ‘ain’t’ and ‘he don’t’ and talk about putting on his ‘britches’ in the morning. He loved to say ‘britches.’ ”

  The content of our conversation had flown away, along with any apparent awareness on his part of who I was. He continued to stare through the glass, his hands on his hips. Then he shook his head and turned to me as though addressing an old friend. “Smart at figures and dumb as a turnip about everything else. Where did I go wrong with that poor boy?” he said.

  “When I look at Alafair, all I see is the little girl. I guess that’s what I came out here to tell you,” I said.

  There are moments when our common humanity allows us to see into the souls of our worst adversaries. I wanted to believe this was one of them. It wasn’t.

  “Well, I guess I started this saccharine introspection,” he said. “Now that you’ve accomplished your objective, Mr. Robicheaux, you can be on your way.”

  Any illusions I had about Love Younger were gone. I realized that I had the same importance to him as any number of servicepeople who swam in and out of his ken every day.

  I walked outside onto the lawn, into the breeze and the popping of flags and pennants atop the canvas tents and canopies. The guests of Love Younger were not bad people. They worked hard and loved their country and were fiercely self-reliant. They didn’t apologize for their values or their belief systems, and their physical courage was unquestionable. My quarrel was with the illusion into which I felt they had been lured. I had thought earlier that the gathering at the Younger ranch was akin to a medieval festival. It was no such thing. Love Younger was not an ideologue. Politics had nothing to do with the energies that drove him. His invitation to his ranch was a charade, a mask for the design of a willful and imperious man who had spent a lifetime controlling and destroying the people he loved most.

  Why my lack of charity? Because the security man named Kyle, who did the bidding of his master, was staring at me from behind his sunglasses with far more interest than casual curiosity. His khakis were belted high up on his hips, his long-sleeved shirt snap-buttoned at the wrists. His body English did not serve him well: His arms were folded, an unconscious mechanism that often indicates repressed hostility or retention of information the individual takes pride in not sharing. It was his boots that caught my attention. They were cordovan, and from the stiffness in his trouser legs, I guessed they were stovepipes. Perhaps Tony Lamas.

  I walked toward him. Caspian stood at his side, inserting a pinch of Copenhagen inside his cheek. “I was admiring your footwear,” I said.

  “I bet one day you’ll have a pair of your own,” Kyle said.

  “Are they Lamas?”

  “Justins.”

  “I’d like to have a look at them. Would you mind?” I said.

  He laughed to himself and turned his face into the breeze. His hair was long, over his collar, stiff with gel. He looked back at me. There was something wrong with his eyes. He seemed to gaze at two objects simultaneously, or to be thinking about something that had nothing to do with the subject at hand. “Can I help you find a table?”

  In the background I could see Alafair and Clete watching us from under a canopy. Clete held a foaming beer cup in one hand and a huge barbecue beef sandwich in the other. “No, thanks. My daughter and a friend are with me,” I said. “I’d still like to have a look at your boots, though.”

  Kyle smiled at nothing and lifted the toe of one boot off the ground, the heel anchored on the grass. “They’re first-class. I recommend them,” he said. “Anything else?”

  “You look like you’ve got a nasty cut under that bandage on your neck.”

  “You got that right. My girlfriend is a biter. She’s a screamer, too. But what are you gonna do?”

  “I bet your Justins are hand-tooled. Can you let me see the tops?”

  Kyle looked at Caspian Younger, grinning. “Buddy, you’re a case,” he said.

  “A lot of people tell me that. You know what a short-eyes is?”

  He looked thoughtfully into space. “A pygmy?”

  “That’s a guy who’s gone down for molestation of a child. A guy with a short-eyes in his jacket has a hard time inside. My suspicion is that most child molesters are capable of gang rape as well. What’s your opinion on that? Did you know any gang rapists inside?”

  “Kyle answers to me,” Caspian said. “If you have a beef with him, talk to me about it.”

  A beef? I wondered which movie he had learned the term from. “You and your father give jobs to former felons. I thought Kyle might know something about rapists and child molesters.”

  “Why’d you come here? Was it because of what I did to your friend over there?” Caspian said.

  “Clete? No. He did tell me about your throwing a cupful of Coca-Cola in his face, but I think he’s written it off.”

  “That’s because he knows he’s out of his depth,” Caspian said.

  “Do you have any idea how fortunate you are, Mr. Younger?” I asked.

  “Before you give me a speech about how dangerous your pal is, let me explain something to you. I gave him a warning the first time he messed with my wife. I told him it wasn’t his fault. I also told him not to do it again.”

  He had a point. Clete was sleeping with another man’s wife, a situation that gives the philanderer little claim to the high ground. I guess I should have walked away. Except I could not forget a detail from Wyatt Dixon’s account about the assault on him and his girlfriend by three masked men on the Blackfoot River.

  “I have compulsions, Kyle,” I said. “I get something in my head, and it just won’t let go. With me, it’s your boots. I’d also like to know more about your history. You see, I know you’ve been up the road. You don’t like cops, you’re a wiseass, and you think you’re smarter than other people. That’s a profile of about ninety-eight percent of the people inside the system. My guess is you don’t like women, and the reason for that is they don’t like you.”

  “What’s gonna make you happy?” Kyle said. “You want to get thrown out or beat up? There’s something about me that gives you a hard-on? You’re too old for it, man.”

  It was none of the above. I was not sure what I felt toward Caspian and Love Younger and the employee named Kyle. They may have been the catalyst for the strange physiological and emotional change taking place inside me, but they were not the source. The change always started with a twitch under one eye, as though I were losing control of my facial muscles. Then I would experience a popping sound in my ears, one that was so severe I could not hear what others around me were saying. I would see their mouths opening and closing, but none of their words would be audible. I guess a therapist could call the syndrome a chemical assault on the brain, the same kind that supposedly occurs when a suicide goes off a roof or paints the ceiling by placing a shotgun under his chin. In my case, the inside of my head would fill with a whirring noise that arrived in advance of a red-black rush of color and heat that I can compare only to gasoline and oil igniting inside a confined space.

  When those things happened in the sequence I described, I became someone else. I did not simply want to punish my adversary, I wanted to kill him. It gets worse. I did not want to kill him with a weapon, I wanted to do it with my bare hands. I wanted to break the bones in his face with my fists, to knock his teeth down his throat, crush his thorax, and leave him gasping for breath as I rose splattered with blood from the damage I had inflicted upon him.

  When I told others these things, I saw a level of sadness
and pity and fear in their eyes that made me vow to never again discuss the succubus that has lived inside me most of my life.

  Over Kyle’s shoulder, I saw Clete and Alafair walking toward us, Clete pausing only long enough to place his sandwich and beer cup on a picnic table. He had polished his shoes and put on a suit for the occasion. His eyes were clear, the gin roses gone from his complexion, his porkpie hat at a jaunty angle. When Clete was off the dirty boogie, he looked almost as youthful and handsome as when he and I walked a beat in the Quarter.

  “How’s your corn dog hanging, Casp?” he said, swinging his arm through the air, slapping Caspian Younger between the shoulder blades with such force that he almost knocked him down.

  “It’s under control here, Clete,” I said.

  “I grok what you’re saying,” he replied, easing himself between me and Kyle, his eyes sweeping the crowd, not looking at any of us. “I grok this whole place. I grok the food. I grok the people.”

  “You do what?” Kyle said.

  Clete’s gaze was still on the crowd. “Is Dave right, Caspian? Is everybody copacetic here?” he said.

  “If you’re looking for her, she’s inside,” Caspian replied, arching his back from the blow Clete had delivered. “Why don’t you go talk to her, then get the fuck out of here?”

  “Who’s inside?” Clete said.

  “You know who. She’s going to stay inside, too,” Caspian said.

  “You got a trophy room in there, heads on the walls, stuffed cougars crouched on the beams, that kind of thing?” Clete said. “I get the feeling I’m standing in the middle of an ammo dump.”

  Clete was like the baseball manager who comes out of the dugout, his hands stuffed in his back pockets, and starts yelling harmlessly at the umpire to take the heat off one of his players. In this instance, he had intervened in a situation on my behalf and perhaps saved me from getting hurt. But now he was testing the edges of the envelope.

  “Go ahead,” Caspian said.

  “Go ahead, what?” Clete said.

  “Do what you’re thinking about and see what happens. I think you’re a lard ass and you’ve got a Vienna sausage for a penis. At least that’s what Felicity says. Yeah, you got it, she made her big confession. All sins are forgiven. I called a couple of guys in Tahoe. They say Sally Ducks kept you around for laughs and let you polish his car or clean his toilet, I don’t remember which. They say when Sally Dee met you, you were one cut above queer bait on the Strip.”

  “Here’s the rest of the story: Sally Ducks got french-fried in his own grease, along with everybody else on his airplane,” Clete said.

  Kyle removed a two-way phone from his pants pocket.

  “Put it away,” Clete said. “Alafair and Dave and I are going back to our table. After I finish my beer and sandwich, we’ll motivate on down the road.”

  “You’re gonna do what?” Caspian said.

  “Motivate. It’s from Chuck Berry, asshole,” Alafair said. She pushed past Clete and pointed in Caspian’s face. “Say one more word like that to Clete, and I’m going to rip you apart, you little twerp.”

  How do you pull the plug on a situation like this?

  “I came here to speak with Mr. Younger, and I did,” I said. “That’s it. We’re gone.”

  I started walking as though our departure were a done deal. Alafair and Clete hesitated, then caught up with me.

  “You’re just going to walk away?” Clete said.

  “I appreciate what you did back there,” I replied. “Now we’re going home.”

  “What was all that about, anyway?” Alafair asked.

  “One of the men who attacked Wyatt Dixon and his girlfriend stole his Tony Lama boots. He said they were cordovan, just like the ones this guy Kyle is wearing.”

  “He’s wearing Lamas?” Clete asked.

  “He said they were Justins. He wouldn’t show them to me.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Clete said. “Hang loose.”

  He turned around and headed straight for a tent where Kyle was standing by himself, lighting a cigarette, both hands cupped around the burning match. His eyes lifted above the flame as Clete came toward him. He flicked away the match and removed the cigarette from his lips and blew a stream of smoke into the air.

  “Hey, I forgot to tell you something,” Clete said.

  “I can’t wait to find out what that is.”

  “You know what the Eleventh Commandment in New Orleans is?”

  “Tell me, blimpo.”

  “Don’t try to put the slide on the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide.”

  “The who?”

  “I knew you’d say that. Take off your boots.”

  “Tell you what, I’ll let you shine them,” Kyle said. He lifted his cigarette to his mouth and took a puff. “While you’re down there, you can cop my stick.”

  Clete stared at his reflection in Kyle’s sunglasses. The image was anatomically distorted, the head small, the body elephantine, the skin amber-tinted, like those of a miniaturized man trapped inside a beer bottle. “The sign out there says For Staff Only,” he said. “You want to pollute the place reserved for your fellow employees?” Clete pulled the cigarette from Kyle’s mouth and flipped it out on the grass. Then he dropped the flap on the front of the tent.

  “Buddy, you just don’t learn,” Kyle said.

  “Pull up your pants leg.”

  “Enough with the boots. They’re boots. What the fuck is with you?”

  “There’s no chance you and your buds tore the clothes off a woman up the Blackfoot and poured dirt in her mouth, is there? Right before two of you held her down and the third guy climbed on top of her?”

  “You and your friend got a serious thinking disorder.” Kyle started out of the tent, but Clete stepped in his way.

  “I want your boots.”

  “If you haven’t noticed, there’s maybe five hundred people out there. A lot of them are my friends.”

  “You’re right,” Clete said. “Forget everything I said, and let’s see if we can’t find another way.”

  Clete cupped his left hand behind Kyle’s neck, almost as if consoling him, then drove his right fist into the man’s stomach, the blow sinking so deep that Kyle’s upper body jacked forward and his mouth formed into a cone, as though he wanted to speak but couldn’t, the blood draining from his cheeks.

  Clete pushed him onto the ground, stepped on one of his ankles, and twisted the boot off his other foot. He looked at the label inside. “That’s what I call really low-rent. You steal the boots off a guy like Wyatt Dixon? He’s probably got hoof-and-mouth disease. Did you get his socks, too?”

  He stuck the boot under his coat and walked out of the tent onto the fairway. Kyle stumbled after him, thrashing his way through the tent flap. He slipped on the grass and fell down again, gasping for air.

  “The guy’s having a seizure!” Clete shouted, his face dilated with feigned alarm. “Get an ambulance!” He pushed his way through the crowd, not looking back.

  “What happened?” I said.

  “I’ve got one of his boots. It’s a Tony Lama,” he said.

  “What did you do?” Alafair said.

  “I think the guy fell down and got the wind knocked out of him. Don’t run. Everything is copacetic.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I take that back. Haul ass!”

  SUNDAY MORNING WYATT Dixon was lying shirtless and in his socks in a hammock strung between two cottonwoods, down by the water’s edge, in front of his house on the Blackfoot. When he heard somebody clanging across the steel swing bridge, he didn’t know if the sound was real or if a junkyard was rolling around in his head. He picked up his pint of mint-flavored sloe gin and took a sip and gargled with it, then swallowed. With one eye closed, he watched a slender man with a jet-black mustache and flared sideburns approach him. The man was carrying a paper sack.

  “Do you know some people say a law dog has a smell that don’t wash off?” Wyatt said. “They say it’s like trying to launder
the stink out of shit.”

  “You’re a hard man to find, Dixon.”

  “Not if you come to the place I happen to be at. You can call me Mr. Dixon.”

  “Your neighbors say you’ve been drunk for the last couple of days.”

  “I cain’t necessarily say one way or the other. I have these empty spaces in my memory, kind of like holes in rat cheese. My neighbors are still giving out news bulletins on me, huh?”

  “You remember me?”

  “Jack Something. I know it’s not Jack Shit. Wait a minute, it’s coming. You replaced Detective Pepper. The name is Jack Boyd. Or do you like Jack Shit better?”

  The detective lifted his finger at the pint bottle balanced on Wyatt’s chest. “I always heard that stuff tasted like mouthwash with turpentine poured in it.”

  “It does. That’s why I drink it.”

  “I went by your girlfriend’s apartment. Bertha Phelps is still your girlfriend, right?”

  “We’re in a holding pattern.”

  The detective gazed at the river. It was wide and green and veined with froth from a beaver dam upstream. “You must have your women trained. I wish I knew the trick.”

  “About what?”

  “Training women. You use Viagra?”

  Wyatt screwed the cap on his gin bottle and set it down in the grass. He looked at the detective with one eye. “I’m having a little trouble focusing on the direction of your conversation.”

  “She accused the department of trying to put you back inside. From what she says, you’re an innocent man. In fact, you hung the moon. What’s your secret? That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Secret about what?”

  “Lighting up a woman’s inner self. You don’t ride them hard and put them away wet, I guess. I thought that was the cowboy way.”

  Wyatt sat up in the hammock and rested his sock feet on the grass. “I don’t know as I care for the way you’re talking about Miss Bertha.”

  The detective turned the paper bag upside down and let the contents slip loose and fall on the ground. “Ever see that before?”

  “It’s a boot.”

  “It’s a Tony Lama boot. You claimed the men who attacked you stole your Tony Lama boots. They were cordovan. So is this.”