Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  “Now?” she said.

  “Is there any better time?” I replied.

  IT WAS NOT a sentimental act. At a certain age, you realize the greatest loss you can experience is a theft you perpetrate upon yourself—the waste of days given us. Is there any more piercing remorse than the realization that a person has thrown away the potential that resides in every sunrise?

  Alafair chose to stay at the house and work on her novel, and Clete and Molly and I drove in my truck to a spot on the Blackfoot River not far from Colonel Lindbergh’s old ranch. It is difficult to describe what the Blackfoot is like, because many of its natural qualities seem to have theological overtones. Maybe that’s why the Indians considered it a holy place. After the spring runoff, the water is blue-green and swift and cold and running in long riffles through boulders that stay half-submerged year round. The canyons are steep-sided and topped with fir and ponderosa and larch trees that turn gold in the fall. If you listen carefully, you notice the rocks under the stream knocking against one another and making a murmuring sound, as though talking to themselves or us.

  The boulders along the banks are huge and often baked white and sometimes printed with the scales of hellgrammites. Many of the boulders are flat-topped and are wonderful to walk out on so you can fly-cast and create a wide-looping figure eight over your head and not hang your fly in the trees. Wild roses grow along the banks, as well as bushes and leafy vines that turn orange and scarlet and apricot and plum in the autumn. When the wind comes up the canyon, leaves and pine needles balloon into the air, as though the entirety of the environment is in reality a single organism that creates its own rebirth and obeys its own rules and takes no heed of man’s presence.

  The greatest oddity on the river is the quality of light. It doesn’t come from above. There is a mossy green-gold glow that seems to emanate from the table rocks that plate the river bottom, and the trout drifting back and forth in the riffle are backlit by it.

  Molly and Clete and I built a fire from driftwood and made cowboy coffee and melted a stick of butter in a skillet and browned ham-and-onion sandwiches that we added strips of cheese and bacon to. After the sun had climbed above the rim of the canyon, the first flies rose from the bushes along the banks and hovered in the spray above the riffle. We waded into water up to our hips and fished a pool behind a beaver dam where both rainbows and cutthroats were hitting anything we threw at them. They hit with the same fervor you see in trout when the first mayflies hatch. They rise quickly out of the shadows, rolling the fly, slapping their tails on the surface, then running with it for the bottom of a pool, your rod arching and throbbing in your palm. All of the worries and concerns that plague us on a daily basis seem to dissolve and disappear, like smoke, inside this sun-spangled canyon deep in the heart of Blackfoot country.

  Jim Bridger and Andrew Henry and Will Sublette had been here, and Hugh Glass, who later crawled a hundred miles to the Missouri Breaks after he was mauled by a grizzly on the Milk River, and Lewis and Clark and Sacagawea and the black man named York, who was the delight of the Indians because he could walk on his hands. To me, this was a magical land, watched over by ancient spirits, a reminder of the admonition in Ecclesiastes that the race is not to the swift or the proud and that the earth abideth forever.

  We worked our way upstream a half mile from the truck, and while Molly collected rocks, Clete and I began casting on a long blue-green undulating ribbon of trout water bordered on one side by a pebble beach with no brush and, on the other side, a grassy bank full of grasshoppers that fell regularly into the stream and brought the browns and the bulls to the top of the pools.

  Clete was ahead of me, his right arm lifting the fly neatly and cleanly from the riffle before it could be pulled under by the current. His hand would stop at twelve o’clock high, and with his wrist, he would create a slow elliptical pattern over his head, drying the fly, filling the air with a swishing sound that was almost musical.

  Then I heard his cell phone ring. He reeled in his line and hooked his fly in the cork handle of his rod and waded to shore. I couldn’t hear his conversation over the stream, but I saw the concern in his face and the way he turned his back to me and kept glancing over his shoulder, as though he wanted to conceal the intrusion of the outside world on this perfect stretch of river we had stumbled upon.

  That was when I saw something that later seemed too much for coincidence. At least five canine animals were running through the trees on the far bank. At first I thought they were coyotes. But as a rule, coyotes are loners and don’t run in packs. Unlike wolves, they sniff the ground, not the wind, in search of rabbit trails and pocket gophers and chipmunk dens. The canines running through the trees were dark, their ears pointed forward, their heads erect, their tails thick and bushy. The humps on three of them were silver-tipped. I had no doubt they were wolves.

  I saw Clete close his phone and put it in his pocket. I walked up on the beach, water squishing out of my tennis shoes. “Was that Gretchen?” I asked.

  “How’d you know?”

  “The look on your face. You don’t hide your emotions well. Did Surrette come back?”

  “The National Transportation Safety Board issued its report on the crash of the Sierra Club plane. There was an explosion inside the cabin. It was probably a bomb.”

  “How did it get on the plane?”

  “Gretchen said she and the pilot left it parked by a general store on the edge of the Blackfoot rez. The guy who runs the store is a relative of Angel Deer Heart.”

  “Gretchen thinks the Indians are involved in blowing up a plane?”

  “No, she thinks somebody connected with the Youngers planted the bomb while she and the pilot were taking photographs up the road.”

  “Maybe the bomb was put on there earlier,” I said.

  “She says the cabin was clean when she got on at Missoula. At least as far as she could tell.”

  “How is Gretchen taking it?”

  “The pilot was her friend. How do you think she’s taking it?”

  “Let’s go back to town,” I said.

  “I didn’t mean to sound sharp.”

  “We had a good time. Let’s get Molly and head home.”

  He looked across the river into the trees. He pointed. “Do you see what I’m seeing?”

  “They’re wolves.”

  “I never heard of wolves on the Blackfoot. Are they part of that reintroduction program?”

  “I don’t know, Clete. I’m not sure about anything anymore.”

  We walked back down the river, over rocks that were as white as eggs, the trees ruffling on either side of the canyon. A blue rubber raft full of revelers floated past us, all of them toasting us with their beer cans, their faces happy and pink with sunburn. I wanted never to let go of this place. We walked around a bend and saw Molly coming toward us, her mouth moving, her words lost in the wind. Behind her, I could see my truck parked up on the bench, the sun hammering like a heliograph on the windshield.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I walked down below the bend to collect some pieces of driftwood. I didn’t lock the truck. You’d better look inside.”

  “What is it?” I said.

  “See for yourself. I didn’t touch anything.”

  I took off my fly vest and set it down on the rocks and laid my fly rod on top of it. As I approached the truck, I could see a pair of blue women’s panties hanging from the rearview mirror. There was no movement in the trees, no sign of tire tracks other than mine on the access road, nobody on the bank of the river except Molly and Clete. I opened the passenger door and removed the panties from the mirror. There were specks of dried blood near the elastic band. Clete had been standing behind me. He removed a small pair of binoculars from the canvas rucksack he always carried on fishing trips, and began scanning the woods, then the far bank.

  “Maybe it was some college kids playing a prank,” he said. “A bunch of them kayak through here.”

  Someon
e had placed a Montana driver’s license on the dashboard. I picked it up by the edges and looked at the laminated photo of a young woman. She was pretty and seemed pleased to be photographed. There was a bright prospect in her eyes, a glow about her.

  “Who’s it belong to?” Clete asked.

  “Rhonda Fayhee.”

  “Who?”

  “The waitress who went missing up by Lookout Pass.”

  “That son of a bitch was here?”

  “Get Elvis Bisbee on the horn and tell him what we’ve got.”

  “Bisbee is a boob. I’d rather deal with Fart, Barf, and Itch. At least they don’t wear mustaches that look like rope.”

  “The FBI had twenty years to pinch this guy. It took Wichita PD to do it.”

  “How’d he get in and out of here without us seeing him?” he said, punching in a 911 call with his thumb.

  I didn’t want to think about the wolves in the trees on the far side of the river or the wolf that was probably living somewhere behind Albert’s house. The theater of the mind was Surrette’s ally. But I had no doubt he had been here and left two of his trophies for us to find. I also felt that he represented a level of evil far greater in dimension and cunning than the machinations of one individual. I have interviewed condemned inmates on death row in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. My experience with each of them was the same. I believed they were not only dysfunctional but irreparably impaired. They were either schizophrenic or had fetal alcohol syndrome or had been neurologically damaged by severe beatings as children. Normality had never been an option in their lives. And there was no theological side to the story.

  Surrette was different. Men of his ilk wish to re-create the world in their image. The evil they do is of a kind we never erase from memory. I knew I would never forget the image of the woman’s blood-spotted undergarment hanging from my rearview mirror. Nor would I ever be able to explain how a man could take pride in torturing to death an innocent young woman in the flower of her life. I wanted to confront Surrette and make him accountable, not simply for his crimes but for his existence. I think I know why Himmler and other Nazi war criminals killed themselves. They ensured their own immortality by denying us knowledge of who they really were. If I caught Asa Surrette, I was determined that he would tell us his secrets and his origins, even if the rule book got tossed over the gunwale.

  Clete closed his cell phone.

  “What did they say?” I asked.

  “They’re sending a couple of lab guys out. We shouldn’t touch anything,” he replied. He stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth and gazed across the river. “This one really bothers me, Dave.”

  “Join the club.”

  Before he spoke again, he checked to see if Molly was within earshot. “When we get this guy, he’s going into a wood chipper. We’re on the same wavelength about this, right?”

  “I made a mistake earlier,” I said.

  “About what?”

  “I should have listened to Wyatt Dixon.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “That’s the point. I’m not, and neither are you. Dixon is. He probably sees a netherworld others can’t. This one doesn’t have a zip code, Clete. Surrette is the real deal.”

  I thought Clete was going to dismiss me. He didn’t. His face became empty of expression, as though he had lost the thread in our conversation. He leaned over and picked up a handful of rocks and began throwing them in the river, watching them make big plopping holes in the riffle. Then he said, “If I get back to New Orleans, I’m never going to leave.”

  GRETCHEN’S NOTICE IN the personals read:

  Dear friend from the Yellow Brick Road,

  I was impressed. I’m a filmmaker. My first documentary screened at Sundance. I think you and I could work together on a biopic. I’ve already got the financing. Someone told me you have an unpublished novel. You know how to contact me. It’s your call.

  The munchkin from the ridge,

  G.H.

  “How’d you think up something like this?” Clete said when she told him what she had done.

  “All predators troll. Even when they’re inactive or in prison, they troll.”

  “That’s not the issue.”

  “He let Alafair interview him in prison because he thought she was going to write a book about him. He took creative writing courses at Wichita State and wrote a novel based on himself. He thinks he’s an intellectual and a great artist.”

  “You should have talked to me first.”

  “I need approval?” she said.

  “The guy tried to kill you with a bear trap. Your life was saved by a rabbit.”

  “I get you. I’m so inept, I’d be dead except for the intervention of an animal.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “Surrette is a narcissist, Clete. Believe me, he’ll swallow the bait. Hollywood is a drug. Its sharpest critics are fascinated by it. Otherwise they wouldn’t be talking about it all the time.”

  “He outsmarted the cops for twenty years, Gretchen. He survived a collision with a gas truck. Dave thinks Surrette may come from somewhere else. He didn’t say it exactly that way, but that’s what he’s thinking.”

  “How about taking the mashed potatoes out of your mouth?”

  “Years back we went up against a guy named Legion Guidry. He was an overseer on a plantation in Iberia Parish.” Clete shook his head as though deciding whether he should revisit the experience. “I think maybe this guy wasn’t human. I try to forget about him. I get the heebie-jeebies when I start thinking too much about stuff like that.”

  They were sitting on the front porch of the cabin. It was Friday, the beginning of a fine weekend, and Gretchen could see the mist from the sprinklers in Albert’s yard blowing on the flower beds and the patches of clover in the fescue. It was the kind of summer day that lacked only the smell of mowed grass to be perfect. “What stuff?” she said.

  “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Don’t leave me hanging like this.”

  “Dave believed Legion Guidry worked for the devil. I didn’t want to hear it. I grew up listening to stuff like that. But Dave and I never could explain a lot of the things Guidry did or the power he seemed to have over people.”

  “You guys got him, right? Doesn’t that tell you something? He was flesh and blood.”

  “It wasn’t us. He was hit by lightning. He ran into a swamp with bullets flying around him. Then lightning hit the woods. The coroner and some deputies found his body floating in a bay with a bunch of dead pigs.”

  Clete had been drinking a can of warm beer. He picked it up, then looked at it as though he didn’t know where it had come from. He set it back down and stared into space.

  “Are you all right?” she said.

  “Yeah, I’m fine. I don’t like to go inside my own head sometimes.”

  “Wichita PD nailed Surrette,” she said. “He wasn’t the criminal genius of the century.”

  “He sent them a floppy disk that could be traced to his employer’s computer. He made the disk on a Saturday, when no one else was in the office. I think he deliberately screwed up.”

  “What for?”

  “He wasn’t getting enough attention. He wanted to stand up in court, in front of the families, and describe in detail what he did to his victims. He was happier than a hog rolling in shit.”

  “Both you and Dave are letting this guy get to you. There’s one way you deal with a guy like Surrette. You put more holes in him than he can put plugs in. It’s that simple.” He turned in his chair. She saw the sadness in his eyes. “Don’t look at me that way,” she said.

  “That’s the stuff shank artists in the joint say,” he replied. “You get that kind of language out of your vocabulary.”

  “What I’m saying is the guy’s no supervillain. He’s not from the Abyss,” she said. “You’ve been around the worst of the worst. You know they all go down.”

  “I took money from the Giacanos and worked for Sa
lly Dee. They were bad guys, but they didn’t come close to Legion Guidry. This is what you’re choosing not to hear. Dave is right about Surrette. How does he come and go on Albert’s property? How’d he disappear after he almost killed you with a bear trap?”

  “Are we working together or not?” she asked.

  “I’ll always back your play. You know that.”

  “Sometimes I’m not sure.”

  “Don’t ever say that to me again,” he said.

  “Why do you talk to me like that?”

  “Because sometimes I feel like it.”

  “You really know how to treat a girl, Clete. Fuck you,” she said.

  ALBERT CAME DOWN to the cabin Saturday morning and told Gretchen someone had left a message for her on his answering machine. The call was not from Asa Surrette but from a woman who sounded as though she were reading a prepared statement. “This is for Gretchen Horowitz from her friend up on the ridge,” the female voice said. “You’re correct about me having written a novel. Maybe Mr. Hollister might like to read it sometime. He might even like it. I would also like to talk with you about the biopic. Will Alafair be working on the project? Take care of yourself, munchkin. I think you and I might have great fun together.”

  The woman gave a number and broke the connection. Gretchen jotted down the number and turned around. Unbeknownst to her, Albert had been standing two feet behind her. “What was that about?” he said.

  “A project I’m working on,” she replied.

  “We need to understand something, Miss Gretchen. I don’t impose my way on others. But my name was used in that message. I want to know what this is about.”

  “Asa Surrette,” she replied.

  “You’re going to bait him out of his hole, are you?”

  “If I can.”

  “What are you going to do when you catch up with him?”

  “That’s up to him.”

  “You have a gift. It comes from a source outside of yourself. It was given to you for a reason, and eventually, that reason will manifest in your life. Don’t let the world taint it or take it from you. Men like Surrette despise you for the talent and intelligence that were given to you for a higher purpose.”