Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  “Why’s he going into meltdown?”

  “Felicity Louviere is stronger than he is, and he knows it.”

  Clete Purcel was talking to a sheriff’s detective by a cruiser. The agent watched him curiously. “I think you guys are operating as vigilantes, Detective Robicheaux,” he said. “I think you plan to cool out Surrette.”

  “That’s news to me.”

  “A guy with the AG’s office in New Orleans says Clete Purcel may have poured liquid Drano down a Nazi war criminal’s throat.”

  “I wouldn’t believe everything I hear down there,” I replied.

  “The guy says you were probably there when it happened.”

  “Some days I think I have Alzheimer’s.”

  “Maybe you ought to see a doc. Take Purcel with you.”

  “What for?”

  “There’s blood in his barf,” he said. “Maybe he drank some of that Drano himself.”

  AT EIGHT-FIFTEEN THAT evening, Gretchen Horowitz went up to Alafair’s bedroom. Alafair was working at her desk, wearing jeans and loafers without socks and a man’s long-sleeved khaki shirt. Shadows had already started to fall on the pasture and the barn, and the crests of the hills had taken on a golden glow in the sunset. “I was wondering where you were,” Alafair said.

  Gretchen sat down on the edge of the bed. “I had a visit with Caspian Younger.”

  “Did Dave tell you what happened at the house up the road?”

  “Clete told me. I need to talk to you about something.”

  “You know about the abduction of the two girls? They used to feed carrots to Albert’s horses.”

  “Yeah, I heard all about it, Alafair. Did you hear what I said? I’ve got to talk with you.”

  Alafair set down the sheet she had been working on and took off her glasses. “You need to rein it in, Gretchen.”

  “I did a beat-down on Caspian Younger and that ex-detective Jack Boyd.”

  “Clete already tore them up.”

  “I thought a second helping wouldn’t hurt. My head is bursting. Will you please listen to me?”

  “Yes, please tell me, whatever it is.”

  “You don’t have to get bent out of shape. Rhonda Fayhee told me she was kept in a basement of some kind. She could hear water lapping against a boat or a dock or a beach. She also heard an airplane taking off and landing, but it was below the level of the window. She heard wind through a lot of trees close by. Here’s the last part: Not far away, people were singing a hymn of some kind. Rhonda remembered the words ‘Life is like a mountain railroad, with an engineer that’s brave.’ ”

  “Those details don’t go together very well,” Alafair said. “The plane was beneath the level of the window?”

  “She could hear water chucking at the same time.”

  “She was on a hillside by a lake, one big enough for an amphibian?”

  “That’s what I would think,” Gretchen said. “A lake that has a lot of trees on the shore.”

  “There are lakes all over this area. Over in Idaho, too.”

  “She said the wind made a rushing sound in the trees, like they grew everywhere and were thick with leaves.”

  “An orchard?” Alafair said.

  “Yeah, an orchard,” Gretchen said. “It’s cherry-picking season. Where would that put us?”

  “Flathead Lake?” Alafair said.

  “I’m glad you said that.”

  “Why?”

  “Because Caspian was bragging about his contacts in Vegas. He said he could have Clete shredded into fish chum. He said there would be nothing left of Clete except a bloody skim floating on Flathead Lake. What does Flathead Lake have to do with Vegas?”

  “He had the lake associated with Surrette’s previous involvement with the casinos?”

  “It’s a possibility,” Gretchen said.

  “It’s more than that,” Alafair said.

  “There’s something else. Caspian Younger told Bertha Phelps where his father was.”

  “You lost me,” Alafair said.

  “Wyatt Dixon is Love Younger’s illegitimate son. His stepfather treated him terribly. Who do you think Dixon blames?”

  “Dixon is going to do something about it?” Alafair said.

  “Maybe.”

  “You’re wondering if you should warn Love Younger?”

  “Yeah, I am. What would you do if you were me?” Gretchen asked.

  “It’s their grief.”

  “That simple?”

  “Wyatt Dixon can take care of himself. Love Younger is a professional son of a bitch and would be the first to tell you that.”

  Gretchen stood up. “Want to take a ride up to the lake?”

  “Let me tell Dave,” Alafair replied.

  WYATT DIXON WAS standing shirtless and barefoot in his kitchen up on the Blackfoot, a ring of fire glowing around one of the lids on his woodstove, where he had set his coffeepot to boil. Through the side window, he could see the boughs of the cottonwoods swelling in the wind down by the riverbank, the trout starting to rise and dimple the riffle under the steel swing bridge. Through the screen, he could smell the evening as though it were a living presence, the purple and yellow flowers in his yard and the dark green wetness of the fescue part of a song that was never supposed to die. Except he could feel things ending, coming apart at the center, and he didn’t know why.

  “You went up to Younger’s place, didn’t you?” Wyatt said.

  “I was looking for you. I didn’t know where you were,” Bertha said.

  “Was the old man there?”

  “No, he was not.”

  “That twat of a son was, though, wasn’t he?”

  She looked away, her eyes full of injury.

  “He did something to you?”

  “I won’t lie about it.”

  “He put his hand on you?”

  “I said I wouldn’t lie about it, but that doesn’t mean we should fall into his trap,” she replied. “I hate the Youngers. I hate what they’ve done to you.”

  “Tell me what he did, Bertha.”

  “I was going out the door. He kicked me. He laughed when he did it, too.”

  The coffee had started to boil. Wyatt removed the top from the pot and fitted his palm through the handle. He lifted the pot to his mouth and drank, his face as expressionless as a leather mask, his pupils like dead flies trapped in glass. “Where did he kick you?”

  “In the behind.”

  He looked into space and drank again from the pot, his lips gray from the heat. “He told you where the old man was at?”

  “Don’t ask me questions you already know the answers to.”

  “I just want to know where Love Younger is at.”

  “So you can do exactly what Caspian Younger wants you to?”

  He set the coffeepot back on the stove. There was a red stripe across his palm. “Hear it?” he said.

  “Hear what?”

  “A train. Up on the railroad bed.”

  “Those tracks were torn up decades ago. There’s nothing there except the cliff and an empty rail bed.”

  “I heard it a-blowing down the line, whistling through a canyon.”

  “That’s the wind.”

  “No, ma’am, it ain’t. I been hearing that whistle all my life. He’s at Sweathouse Creek, ain’t he?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “I followed him there once. Love Younger ain’t that smart. He sired the likes of me, ain’t he?”

  He slipped on his boots and stuck his sheathed bowie knife in the back pocket of his Wranglers, then pulled on a long-sleeved snap-button shirt and walked through the clutter of his living room and out the front door.

  “I’m coming,” she said. “You’re not going without me.”

  He turned and looked at her. Her expression was disjointed, her anatomical construction seeming to disintegrate as she approached, like a digital figure collapsing into a pile of dots. He pushed at his temple with his thumb until his vision seemed to correct
itself.

  “We’re in this together,” she said. She took hold of his right arm with both hands and clutched it tighter than anyone had ever held him in his life. “We’ll never be apart again. If I have to go with you to the grave, Wyatt Dixon, you hear what I’m saying to you? Don’t you ever try to leave me.”

  LOVE YOUNGER STOOD behind his cabin on Sweathouse Creek and stared up at the canyon walls. There were boulders in the canyon the size of a two-story house, even bigger, all of them surrounded by towering trees that grew cheek by jowl against the stone. He could see bighorn sheep up on a ledge, one that was no more than two feet wide. They were working their way toward the summit of the mountain while tiny rocks rilled down from their hooves, over the lip of the trail, falling at least four hundred feet onto the canopy of cottonwoods that grew along the banks of the creek. A slip, a miscalculation, a weak spot in the stone that split under their weight, and they would plummet to their deaths. Yet they never hesitated or showed fear, as though knowledge of the topography had been wired into them. Love Younger wondered why humankind did not feel the same kind of security. The sun was west of the Bitterroots now, and the air in the canyon had turned cold, and the magenta coloration above the top of the canyon was fading to a dark shade of blue that made him think of a curtain being closed on a stage.

  He had taken a black-powder revolver to shoot at targets he picked out randomly along the creek—a wet rock dancing with spray, a wild rose hanging on a green stem over the current, a cedar stump that had decayed into pulp the color of rust. He aimed at all three of these targets but could not bring himself to pull the trigger. There was a stillness inside the entrance of the canyon that felt almost holy. He raised his eyes to the ledge and realized the bighorn sheep had disappeared inside a low-hanging cloud, as though the mountain had provided sanctuary from either his gaze or his firearm. Was that his role in the world? The harbinger of destruction? The twentieth century’s representative of a petrochemical empire staining the ground with the greasy imprint of his shoes?

  Maybe this was not a good time to be alone, he told himself. But what merit was there in a man’s life if he had to fear solitude? Love Younger had created jobs for hundreds of thousands of workers all over the globe. His pipelines and drilling platforms delivered the oil and natural gas on which the entirety of the industrial world depended. Did any rational person believe he wanted to pollute the earth and incur environmental lawsuits that could cost his companies billions of dollars? Love Younger was a fair man. No one could say he wasn’t. The enemy was poverty, not refineries. How many environmentalists had worn clothes sewn from Purina feed sacks when they were children?

  For Love Younger, depression was another term for self-pity. He had only one problem: He could not reason himself out of the black box he found himself inside. What was the truth about his life? The truth was, he woke every morning with a bête noire that he crowded out of his mind with sums and debits and concerns about the Saudi bench price on the barrel of oil in the same way a drunkard fills himself with whiskey to avoid acknowledging the catastrophe he has made of his life. The story of Love Younger was simple. He had committed the worst crime of which an ordinary human being was capable: He had destroyed his family.

  He set down the heavy Navy Colt .44 on a spool table and waded into the creek. The coldness ran over the tops of his shoes and into his socks with a brittleness that reminded him of drawing water with a bucket from the stream that ran through Snakey Hollow, Kentucky, the place of his birth. As he stared at the long silvery ribbon winding through the canyon, he realized the gleam on the surface he had taken for granted was dying, as though the light were being drawn up through the trees and the canyon walls by the heavens, a shutting down of the day that was more an act of theft than a natural phenomenon.

  He wondered what would happen if he began wading up the creek into the crack in the mountains that gave onto the great Idaho wilderness, disappearing inside its gathering shadows, crunching on the soft bed of sand and coppery pebbles that had been polished as bright as pennies. Could he keep going all the way to the top of the Bitterroots, where the snowmelt formed chains of lakes surrounded with miles of velvet greenery on which deer and elk and moose grazed in the sunrise?

  Like the deerslayers of pre-Revolutionary America, could he walk all the way to the Missouri Breaks and follow the tributaries and the riparian paths of Indians to the inception point of the Mississippi, then find his way to Louisville and west through the bluegrass to the edge of the Cumberlands? Would his birthplace be changed significantly? Would there be a ragged child there who resembled another impoverished Kentucky child, one born during the first administration of Herbert Hoover? Was there some way to go back in time and undo his mistakes and set a straight path that would make his legacy acceptable in the eyes of others?

  He knew these were foolish and vain thoughts, but if a man were contrite of heart, would not a merciful Creator make an exception and return, if only in token fashion, the children who had chosen either physical or spiritual death rather than live under the dominion of their father?

  He walked farther up the creek, into a pool up to his knees, where the current was so cold that his shinbones felt as though they had been beaten with wood mallets. Holding on to a tree branch, he kept going deeper into the canyon, pulling himself along the edges of the current until he was up to his thighs and had no feeling at all beneath the dark wet line across his fly. He wondered if this would not be a bad way to go. He would simply keep walking up the creek into deeper and deeper pools until his entire body was numb and he was subsumed by the woods and the wild roses on the banks and the mist boiling at the bottom of a waterfall. Be my rod and staff, he thought.

  The words angered him. Am I becoming one of the herd, the nitwits who roll in sawdust at camp meetings and dip their hands in boxes of copperheads? Get ahold of yourself.

  He stepped out of the creek, water draining from his trouser cuffs onto the bank, the wind blowing as cold as an icicle through his thin shirt. He had thought his way through his problems and done what he could. The only concern that nagged at the edge of his conscience was his daughter-in-law, Felicity Louviere. But she was not a Younger. She was the offspring of a professional do-gooder and, from what he’d heard, a profligate working-class girl who had decided to enrich herself by marrying his pitiful son. Her fate had nothing to do with him.

  He began walking back down the bank toward the cabin. He could hear bats flying by his head, their leathery wings throbbing, and he remembered how they had frightened him when he was a little boy, at dusk, when the hollow turned into a winter set, no matter what the season. Now he gave them no thought whatsoever, although he was sure some of them were rabid, just as they had been in Snakey Hollow. Why didn’t he fear them? The answer to the question was not complex. A king did not die from the bite of a rodent.

  He went back inside with his .44 cap-and-ball revolver and hung it in a holster on the back of a wicker chair. Then he went outside again and gathered an armful of wood he had split and stacked under a pole shed. He thought he saw a pickup truck, one with a camper mounted on the bed, wending its way out of the dusk toward him, its headlights jiggling with a strange blue-stained white radiance that Love Younger associated with fairy tales more than he did with motorized vehicles.

  Fornicators have to go somewhere, he thought. In the barn or the woods or on top of a corn-shuck pallet. Nothing will ever stop them from mating and pumping out legions of the same mentally defective creatures the world never seems to tire of. Well, have at it. I hope you have better luck with the product of your misspent seed than I did.

  He started a fire in the stone fireplace. As he stood in its heat, steam rose from his wet khakis, and he felt a sense of tranquillity he hadn’t experienced in years. From down below, he heard a vehicle clank across the cattle guard. Was it the fornicators? Or perhaps Caspian’s ex-convict security people coming to tell him that Felicity Louviere had been released by the predator from Kansas
? He didn’t care one way or another.

  Love Younger walked to the door, a bourbon and branch water in his hand. He started to turn the doorknob, then paused and glanced over his shoulder at the blue-black walnut-handled thumb-buster hanging from the back of the chair. What a fine weapon, he thought. Kicks like a jackhammer and, in the dark, throws out a six-inch muzzle flash that would make the devil jump. One hundred and fifty-two years old and deadly as the day of its manufacture. He clicked on the porch light without unlocking the door and pulled aside the window curtain. An orange pickup with a chrome grille was just turning off the dirt road onto Younger’s property. A man wearing a starch-white cowboy hat was behind the wheel, his left arm propped on the window, a purple garter snugged around his upper arm. The man in the white hat drove to within fifty feet of the cabin and cut the engine.

  Dixon again, Younger thought. So it’s about money after all. They claim they don’t want it. They love Jesus and country and their mothers. But it’s always about money and then more money, and if they could, they’d all get naked and wallow in it in the middle of a Walmart. Okay, Mr. Dixon, maybe it’s time you heard a wrathful voice, since you seem to understand no other kind.

  Love Younger set down his tumbler and pulled open the door, his irritability overriding caution. He was staring straight into the high beams of the truck, his eyes tearing and blind to what might be taking place in the truck’s cab.

  “Begone, Wyatt Dixon,” he said. “Disappear into the primeval soup that bred you, and never let the name of my family issue from your lips.”

  The wind had dropped, and he thought he could hear the heat of the engine ticking under the hood.

  AT 8:47 P.M. the phone rang in the kitchen. Molly picked it up. I could hear a man talking on the other end. Molly cut him off. “Sheriff, why don’t you just do your job and stop bothering us?” she said. “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you’re a genuine test of Christian charity, if not a pain in the ass.”

  Then she handed the phone to me. Great start, I thought.

  “Can I help you?” I said.

  “Agent Martini thinks you and Purcel are concealing information from us,” the sheriff said.