Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  Gretchen Horowitz stepped out of the sun’s brilliance so Bertha Phelps and Wyatt could see her clearly. Behind her, the Kamikaze rose into the air, teetering against the sky as the teenagers inside the wire cage screamed in delight, then rushed toward the earth. “Hello, cowboy,” she said. “I won’t take but a minute.”

  “I know why you’re here,” he replied. “This here is Miss Bertha. I ain’t sure I want to get involved.”

  “Asa Surrette says someone wants to see you hurt. I think he means to do it himself,” she said. “You know who Surrette is, don’t you?”

  “It don’t matter what he calls hisself. His real name is in the Book of Revelation.”

  “No, it isn’t. He’s a serial killer from Kansas. He’s not a mythological figure. He’s a sack of garbage. He killed Angel Deer Heart, and he may try to kill you.”

  “Don’t you be telling him these things,” Bertha said. “Who are you to come here and do this? You should be ashamed of yourself.”

  Gretchen looked at the heavyset woman, then back at Wyatt Dixon. “Do you know any reason the Younger family might hold a grudge against you? Caspian Younger in particular?”

  “I could say their kind don’t like working people, and I got in their face. But that ain’t it.”

  “Miss, please leave,” Bertha said.

  “It’s all right,” Wyatt said. “Miss Gretchen is just doing what she thinks is right. He was using the name Geta Noonen when he grabbed the waitress.”

  “How do you know this?” Gretchen asked.

  “I did some investigating on my own.”

  “Have you told anyone?”

  “The state of Montana shot my head full of electricity. You think they’re gonna ask me for advice in catching serial killers? Besides, that ain’t what he is.”

  “He’s the beast in the Bible?”

  “No, he’s probably an acolyte, a lesser angel in the bunch that got thrown down to hell.”

  “I’ve had all this that I can listen to,” Bertha said, getting up from the table. “You get out of here and leave us alone.”

  “I’m sorry for upsetting you,” Gretchen said.

  “Love Younger come out to my place and fished off my bank,” Wyatt said. “He asked about my folks. He asked if I was part Indian. What the hell would he care about my folks?”

  “Watch your back, Wyatt. Good-bye, Ms. Phelps,” Gretchen said.

  Wyatt watched Gretchen walk through a field of parked cars, her red shirt and chestnut hair seeming to blur and merge with the molten intensity of the sun. He pushed aside his food and removed a whetstone and a large sheathed bowie knife from a rucksack by his foot. The knife had a white handle and a nickel-plated guard. He began sliding the blade up and down the length of the whetstone, his eyes fixed on a spot three inches in front of his face.

  “Why are you doing that?” Bertha asked.

  “I’m gonna wear it in the snake dance.”

  “Why are you sharpening it?”

  “I used to do this when I was a little boy. I’d take my bicycle way out in the woods, along with my pocketknife and a piece of soap rock I dug from a riverbed. That’s when I learned not everybody has the same clock. I’d disappear and go somewhere I wouldn’t have no memory of later, then come back and still be sharpening my pocketknife.”

  “You mustn’t talk about these things anymore,” she said. “We need to go on a trip, maybe to Denver. We could stay at the Brown Palace. The Sundance Kid and Butch Cassidy stayed there. Did you know that?”

  “I think some things are starting to catch up with me, Bertha. In my dreams, there’s something I ain’t supposed to see. I got a feeling what it is.”

  “Don’t talk about it. Let go of the past.”

  “Something happened when I was about fifteen. I can almost see it, like it’s hiding right around a corner. You know what all this is about?”

  “No, and I don’t want to hear it,” she said, her voice starting to break.

  “I picked the wrong goddamn parents,” he said. “Either that or they picked the wrong kid to use a horse quirt on.”

  THE ROOM REVEREND Geta Noonen had rented was located on the second floor of an old frame house at the far end of the hollow, below a slit in the mountains through which he could see the evening star from his window. Geta, as his host family called him, had a backstairs entrance and his own bathroom with an old-fashioned claw-footed bathtub. There was a nostalgic element about his new home, a hint of the agrarian Midwest and the immigrant farm families who plowed the prairies and planted the land with Russian wheat. Everything about the house reminded him of the world in which he had grown up: the glider on the front porch, the linoleum floor in the bathroom, the freeze cracks in the paint around the window, the stamped tin ceiling, a stovepipe hole in the wall patched with an aluminum pie plate. The upstairs echoed with the sounds of the teenage girls running through the hallways, slamming doors, giggling about the boys who called them on the phone, not unlike the way his sisters had carried on during adolescence. Geta thought of all these things with great fondness until he began to remember other things that had occurred in the foster home west of Omaha, a house in which one room always stayed locked and no one ever asked what was beyond the door.

  It was not a time to reflect upon these matters. The world moved on and so did he. As he soaked in the tub, his chin barely above the gray patina of soap that covered the surface, he could see the sun setting beyond trees that grew out of the rocks, its orange glow as bright as a burnished shield hung on a castle wall. No, it was not a shield, he told himself. It was a celestial talisman, a source of enormous natural heat and energy that was about to be transferred into the hands of a man the world had too long taken for granted.

  Many a night he had studied the heavens through a cell window and had seen his destiny as clearly as he saw the Milky Way, a shower of white glass on black velvet trailing into infinity, not unlike the magical light that he sometimes felt radiating from his palms.

  The greatest gift he possessed and that others did not was recognition. He saw a universe that was not expanding but contracting, a vortex at the center sucking all of creation into its maw. The goal of the physical universe was the reverse of what everyone thought. Its goal was annihilation. What could equal nothingness in terms of perfection? Those who could accept such conclusions became the captains of their souls, the masters of their fate, the puppeteers who looked down from above at the stick figures jiggling on the ends of strings.

  Did he cause pain in the world? So what? Moses executed hundreds if not thousands; during the Great War, the kings of Europe dined on pheasant while sending hundreds of thousands to their deaths. No one dwelled upon the damage a boot print did to an anthill. The strong not only prevailed over the weak, they deliberately freed themselves from the restraints of morality. In so doing, they became weightless, able to float loose from their earthly moorings. It wasn’t a complex idea.

  He shut his eyes and slipped deeper into the water, luxuriating in its warmth, his hands clasped on the tub’s rim, his phallus floating to the top of the water. Half of the upstairs had been ceded to him by the family, along with keys to the back entrance and the bathroom. He kept the bathroom door locked whenever he was not using it, in part so no one else would see the photos he had taped to the walls, in part to conceal the odor he left twice a day clinging to the sides of the tub, the bar of soap he used, the brush he scrubbed his skin with, the towel he wiped under his armpits.

  The problem was a parasite, he was sure, one he had ingested by eating off a dirty plate in prison. It had laid its eggs in his viscera and cycled its way through his system and hidden in his glands, filling his clothes with an odor that made people move away from him in elevators and on public transportation. He was not the only victim. A blind inmate who had murdered his wife and children and stayed in twenty-three-hour lockdown had the same syndrome. So did a pederast who worked in the prison laundry. The prison psychiatrist said the problem was caused b
y either an obstructed bowel or food poisoning, and the odor associated with it was only natural; he said it would pass. When the psychiatrist excused himself to use the restroom, Geta spit in his coffee cup.

  Now he drained the tub and washed himself again, this time with ice-cold water, sealing his pores, then sprayed his body with deodorant. He dressed in clean slacks and a white shirt and combed his bleached hair straight back in the mirror. He had lost weight and browned his skin and added bulk to his upper arms by splitting firewood in the sun, taking ten years off his appearance. Maybe it would be a good evening to do a little trolling downtown, visit a college bar or two. Just for fun. Nothing serious. A test of his powers. His own kind of catch-and-release program. He smiled at his sense of humor.

  All the photos on the walls had been shot with a zoom lens after he decided to reopen his career in western Montana. Of the twenty photos, eight of them contained a diminutive yet buxom middle-aged woman who affected the dress and indifferent air of a 1960s flower child.

  He touched one of the photos with his fingertips, then breathed on it as if trying to fog a windowpane. He stroked her face and hair and wet his index finger and drew a damp line across her throat and another one across her eyes and another one across her ribs. There was a whirring sound in his ears, like the hum of a crowd in a giant stadium, the sun boiling down directly overhead. He thought he heard the cry of wild beasts, a rattling of chains, an iron grille sliding open, the crowd roaring. He could have sworn he smelled the raw odor of blood and hot sand and the sweaty stench of people held captive in underground rooms.

  He patted the photo affectionately, his cheeks dimpled with a suppressed smile. Our time is almost at hand, he thought. It will be a grand event announced by trumpets and dwarfs beating drums and a costumed Chiron waiting to dance around the dead and soldiers thumping the shafts of their spears on stone.

  He began to experience a sense of arousal so intense that he had to close his eyes and open his mouth, as though he were on an airplane that had lost altitude in the midst of an electric storm.

  Through the door, he heard the two girls hurrying down the wood stairs and out the front of the house, their father telling them to be home early. Geta went back to his bedroom and bolted the door behind him, then took four clear plastic wardrobe bags from his footlocker and laid them on the bed. Yes, be home early, my little ones, he thought. And you, Mommy and Daddy, enjoy your menial, insignificant lives while you can. Your embryonic sacs await you.

  He was startled by a knock on the door. “Who is it?” he said.

  “It’s me,” the wife said. “Will you join us for coffee and dessert?”

  He thought for a moment. “Are you having cherry pie?” he asked through the door.

  “Why, how did you know?”

  “The season for cherry picking is upon us,” he replied. “I’ll be along in just a minute. It’s so nice of you to invite me.”

  I SLEPT UNTIL SEVEN A.M. Friday and woke with no memories of my dreams or even of having gotten up during the night. I woke with a clarity of mind that seems to come less and less frequently as we grow older, maybe because the memory bank is full or because our childhood fears are unresolved in the unconscious. Regardless, I came to a realization that had eluded me prior to that morning—namely, that Asa Surrette, a man I had never seen, had threaded his way into all our lives and divided us among ourselves.

  I had alienated both Alafair and Gretchen by going to the FBI and placing Gretchen in their bomb sights. I suspected the discord and distrust was exactly what Surrette wanted. The great irony in combating evil people is the fact that any proximity you have to them always leaves you soiled, a little diminished, a little less sure about your fellow man. It’s theft by osmosis.

  After I brushed my teeth and shaved, I went downstairs and fixed two cups of coffee and hot milk, then took them to Alafair’s bedroom. She was awake in bed, lying on her side, gazing out the window at a yearling and its mother playing with one of Albert’s colts, racing up and down the pasture.

  Alafair looked over her shoulder at me. “What’s up, doc?” she said.

  I pulled a chair up to her bed and handed her one of the coffee cups. “The only lasting lesson I’ve learned in life is that nothing counts except family and friends,” I said. “When you get to the end of the road, money, success, fame, power, all of the things we kill each other for, fade into insignificance. The joke is, it’s usually too late to make use of that knowledge.”

  She sat up, her back against a pillow, her long black hair touching her shoulders. “I never doubted what was in your heart,” she said.

  “We’ve all done the best we could in dealing with Surrette,” I said. “He wins if we become angry and distrustful with one another.”

  “I started all this when I interviewed him.”

  “That’s good of you to say, but I don’t think that’s where it started. Surrette didn’t follow us from Louisiana to Albert’s place. He was already here.”

  “But why?”

  “Maybe it has to do with the Youngers. Maybe not. He shot an arrow at you on the ridge behind the house. He left his message in the cave behind the house. He set a bear trap for Gretchen behind the house. He seems to take an enormous interest in this particular stretch of terrain.”

  “Albert?” she said.

  “Surrette fancies himself an intellectual and a writer. Albert is both, and notorious for his radical political views. Maybe that has something to do with it.”

  Alafair drank the rest of her coffee and put on a robe. “Gretchen and I did some background checking on Angel Deer Heart’s family,” she said. “Her parents were killed in an automobile accident. The three children were sent to an orphans’ home in Minnesota. Angel’s brother and sister died during an outbreak of meningitis. That’s when Angel was adopted by Caspian Younger and Felicity Louviere. You with me so far?”

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “The family owned a hundred acres between the rez and the boundary of Glacier National Park. The Deer Heart land isn’t far from where several exploratory wells have been drilled.”

  “What happened to the land?”

  “It was put in a trust for the children. It doesn’t have much agricultural value, but the family held on to the mineral rights.”

  “Who owns it now?”

  “Angel Deer Heart would have inherited the land on her eighteenth birthday.”

  I looked at her blankly. “So it goes to whom?”

  “Take a wild guess.”

  “Caspian Younger and his wife?”

  “No, just Caspian. Isn’t that lovely?”

  “How’d you find out all this?” I asked.

  “Gretchen hired two reference librarians. Both of them are retired and in their eighties. They asked if ten dollars an hour would be too much to charge,” she said.

  I couldn’t concentrate. I did not like Caspian Younger. I had known many like him, raised in an insular environment, protected from the suffering and pain and toil of the masses, effete and vain and incapable of understanding privation. But the implication was hard to accept.

  “You think Caspian knows Surrette?”

  “We couldn’t find any evidence to that effect. After Surrette got out of the navy, he did security for some casinos. Atlantic City and Reno and Vegas were second homes for Caspian as well as his father. Gretchen told you the father kept fuck pads in several places, didn’t she?”

  “How about it on the language?”

  “When will you stop moralizing at my expense?”

  “I’m serious. It sounds terrible. You can’t imagine how bad that word sounds when it comes out of your mouth.”

  “Not someone else’s?”

  Don’t take the bait, I thought. I also knew, with a great sense of relief, that our relationship was back to normal. “I’m going to fix breakfast for you and Molly. You coming?” I said.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “You’ll always be my little g
irl, whether you like it or not.”

  “You’ll never change,” she said. “That’s why I love you, Pops.”

  GRETCHEN WOKE AT sunrise and looked out her window. Normally, at this time of day, the horses were grazing by the wheel line, where the grass was taller. Instead, they were in a grove of aspens up by the road, their heads and necks extended over the rail fence, eating carrots a woman was feeding them from a sack. Gretchen put on jeans and a jacket and her half-topped suede boots and walked into the trees.

  “Clete’s still asleep, if that’s who you’re looking for,” she said.

  “I was just taking a drive. I stopped at the grocery in Lolo and bought these for the horses,” Felicity Louviere said. “Does anyone mind if I feed them?”

  Her face held no color or expression. Even her voice was toneless. She made Gretchen think of someone who wanted to offer condolences or amends at a funeral but arrived too late and found the church empty.

  “You want me to wake Clete?” Gretchen said.

  “No. He said you were in contact with Asa Surrette. Is that true?”

  “I’ve been in contact with a guy who might be him. But I can’t swear to it.”

  “He has the waitress with him?”

  “I don’t know. Can I help you, Ms. Louviere? You don’t look well.”

  “You’ve actually talked to this man?”

  “He’s called me on my cell phone.”

  “Did he say anything about Angel?”

  “No. I think you should come inside.” Gretchen stepped between two of the horses and took the bag of carrots. “You shouldn’t give treats to horses with your fingers. You let them take it from the flat of your hand so they won’t accidentally bite you.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Did something happen that you want to talk about?”

  “I shouldn’t have bothered you. What time is it? There’s no light in this valley until after nine, is there? Or is it dark most of the time? It seems Montana is like that. Often dark.”