Light of the World

by James Lee Burke

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know how to put it. It’s ancient country. It’s like it’s full of ghosts, like we stumbled into something a lot bigger than us.”

  “Don’t think that way. A perp is a perp. Like you always said, bust them or dust them. We’re the good guys; they’re not.”

  “Sounds good. Except you know better,” he said. “Surrette is the real deal, Dave.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “A guy you can’t put a label on. A guy who was allowed to go on killing people for over twenty years. How’d we get into this shit? Why us? It’s like we didn’t have a choice, like we were supposed to meet up with this guy.”

  I did not want to dwell on the implications. Clete was not one given to extravagant rhetoric. The fact that he had said what he said made my breath come short in my chest.

  We continued through the orchard, fifteen feet apart. The first shed was a long weathered building shaped like a boxcar, with a peaked, shingled roof. Through the trees, I could see two SUVs and a Chrysler parked on a gravel roadway. Eight or nine men had gathered by the car. Both Clete and I sank to one knee and remained motionless inside the orchard, the branches waving above us, shadows shifting back and forth on our bodies.

  The wind is the enemy of every infiltrator in a wooded area; when it blows, everything moves except the infiltrator. The other enemy is the reflection of light on your face. Clete and I lowered our heads and stared at the ground. We could hear one man addressing the others. There was no mistaking the imperious tone and its implicit sense of entitlement and authority. I’m sure that in Caspian Younger’s mind he was not only a leader of men with the bodies of gladiators whose lives had been characterized by hardship and the violent ethos of mercenaries; he was also their brother-in-arms and knew their needs and commanded their respect. I am sure that Caspian Younger believed he was a man among men.

  As I looked at his Australian flop hat, and the cargo pants tucked into his fur-lined suede boots, and the long-sleeved flannel shirt and quilted vest, and his arms that were like pipe cleaners, I wondered if he had any idea at all of the ridiculous figure he cut. His subordinates probably laughed at him behind his back. His hands were on his hips as if he were a senior officer addressing his troops. We could hear every word he said.

  “Listen up, you guys. You are now in my employ as licensed private investigators and security personnel,” he said. “We are stopping a crime in progress. We are rescuing two innocent teenage girls. I believe my wife is already dead. Before the sun rises, everyone on this property except the two girls may be dead also. That is not our intention, but that is probably what will happen.”

  Up on the highway, a pair of headlights came over the rise and descended the grade, the high beams tunneling through the darkness between the orchards and the slope of the mountain. Caspian was disconcerted for only a moment. “No matter what else happens, there is one man who will not leave this property. That man is Asa Surrette,” he said. “The men who take him out will divide a twenty-thousand-dollar credit line in Las Vegas. I want him blown apart. Does everyone understand?”

  The wind dropped and the night was still. A pickup truck on the highway was slowing as it came down the grade, as though the driver were looking for a turnoff. The pickup passed under a light pole that had been left on over a cherry stand. The truck was painted metallic orange; a camper shell was snugged into the bed.

  “One other thing,” Caspian said. “There’s a fat guy out here named Purcel. He’s a disgraced cop from New Orleans who abused my wife. I want him alive. You can put some holes in him, but he doesn’t do the big exit before I have a chat with him. Are there any questions?”

  “What if some IPs go down?” one man asked.

  “Innocent persons?” Caspian said. “There are no innocent persons. That’s why people get baptized. You didn’t know that? You break eggs to make an omelet. One baby dies, another lives. A whole society is destroyed when one of us steps on an anthill. A hundred thousand die to control the benchmark price on a barrel of oil. That’s how the world operates. We didn’t make the rules. Any other questions?”

  He was smiling. I wondered what Clete was thinking. I also wondered how an execrable creature like Caspian Younger, whose sneer and arrogance were like none I had ever seen, could be given the power to make decisions about the life and death of other people.

  “All right, start your sweep,” he said. “If in doubt, take it out.”

  “That truck up on the highway?” one man said.

  “What about it?” Caspian asked.

  “It just stopped and turned around.”

  CLETE PURCEL’S NIGHT vision was not of an ordinary kind. He did not see the external world more clearly than anyone else during the nocturnal hours, nor did he see it with any less clarity; he simply saw it in a different fashion. After his return from Southeast Asia, he realized that a fundamental change had taken place inside his neurological makeup. The change was not one he understood, at least not until he read an article in a town-and-country magazine about the way horses see the world. According to the article, horses have two visual screens in their heads and watch both simultaneously.

  Unlike the horse, Clete did not have two screens in his head; he had two transmitters, and they contended for space on a single screen. Any number of triggers could send him back in time and click on a live feed from the years 1966 to 1968 and force him to watch scenes from a horror show that never had a good ending.

  He had not moved or even raised his eyelids while Caspian addressed his men. Inside his head, he saw a valley swirling with elephant grass that was never green but always gray or yellow or brown, as though the land had been systemically poisoned and could not follow the dictates of the season. At the far end of the valley were hills that had the softly contoured shape of a woman’s breasts, and in order to reach them, he had to follow the banks of a muddy stream coated with mosquitoes and strung with the feces of water buffalo. The only sounds in the valley were the sucking noises of his boots in the mud and the thropping of helicopters in a sky the color of brass. Even though Clete was now crouched inside a fruit orchard on an alpine lake, he could smell the jungle rot in his feet and the body stink in his utilities and feel sweat running down his sides like lines of black ants.

  “A couple of you guys check out that truck and tell the guy to mind his own business,” Clete heard Caspian say.

  “I’ve seen that truck,” one man said. “You know who that is?”

  “No, I don’t,” Caspian said. “That’s why I told you to check him out.”

  “He’s a shitkicker,” the same man said. “You know, what’s-his-name.”

  “Have I hired a bunch of morons?” Caspian said.

  “We’re on it, Mr. Younger,” another man said.

  “The guy has a squirrel cage for a brain,” the first man said. “I can’t remember his name.”

  “Then be quiet and go find out who he is.”

  Three rockets zipped from an island in the lake and popped overhead in a shower of blue and pink and white foam, lighting the orchard like a pistol flare.

  “Behind you, Mr. Younger,” one of Caspian’s men said, pointing at the cherry trees.

  That was when they all cut loose.

  THEY HAD SEEN Clete but not me. At least six or seven were firing in his direction, the bullets ripping through the trees, cutting branches and raining black cherries on the ground. I was still on one knee. I raised the M-1 to my shoulder and aimed through the peep sight and began shooting. I had never fired an M-1 at a human target. The first man I hit was running for the edge of the shed, trying to position himself so he could choose his shots as his compatriots took the brunt of our fire. I saw red flowers bloom on the back of his shirt while his body jacked forward and struck the shed wall.

  Another man had set up behind the fender of the Chrysler and was firing a semi-auto that had a suppressor and an extended magazine, not aiming and probably not counting rounds. Each sho
t sounded like compressed air released from a bottle of carbonated water. Because the suppressor lowered the bullet’s velocity, the rounds that went past my ear made a whirring sound, like a boomerang whipping through the air. My first shot hit the headlight and blew glass into his face. The second whanged off the top of the fender and hit the shed wall. The third went home and knocked him loose from the car and onto the ground, where he remained with his feet pulled up in a fetal position.

  The bolt locked open on an empty chamber, and I heard the tinny sound of the clip ejecting. I pushed another into the breech and released the bolt and began firing again, the stock recoiling solidly into my shoulder with each shot. I saw Clete Purcel coming toward me, bent low, holding his hip, as though he had walked into the sharp corner of a tabletop. His face was pale, his eyes bigger than they should have been. He sank down next to me. I gathered up the sling of his rifle and slung it on my shoulder. “How bad are you hurt?” I said.

  “I think it went on through. Maybe it clipped a bone,” he said. A bloodstain was spreading through his shirt. “More of them are headed our way.”

  “No, there were only eight or nine besides Younger. I got at least two of them.”

  “I saw them coming down the slope. I didn’t imagine it.”

  I shook my head. “That’s not possible,” I replied. “There’s nobody else up that slope. Keep it simple, Cletus. Younger is an amateur, and so are the guys who work for him. He’s down to a few men.”

  “I know what I saw.” He took his .38 from his holster. “Get going. I’ll slow them up.”

  “That’s not going to happen, Clete. Get up.”

  “I’m too dizzy. That son of a bitch really whacked me.”

  I got to my feet and pulled him up with me, working his big arm over my shoulder. “You’re going with me, or we’re going out together. If we can make it to the driveway, we’ll spray the orchard and have Gretchen and Alf on their flanks. We’ll cut them to pieces.”

  His eyes closed and opened again, as though he were unsure where he was. “Let’s rock,” he said.

  We moved through the trees, the cherries hitting our faces, the tree branches like whips against our skin. Then I heard the report of a rifle from the yard of the stone house and heard a bullet zip through the trees and smack against the shed, followed by a second and a third shot, and I realized Gretchen was putting down covering fire for us with the bolt-action Mauser she carried in her pickup. “See?” I said. “We’re going to make it. Just put one foot after another. It’s easy. Like Rudyard Kipling said about going up Khyber Pass, you do it one bloody foot at a time.”

  I could feel Clete’s knees starting to sag. “I need to rest,” he whispered. “Let me go, Dave. I’ll be all right. I’ve just got to sit down and rest for a while. I’ve never felt this tired.”

  CLETE SAT IN a grassy depression in the lawn of the stone house, a swale that probably operated as a drain during the spring runoff. He stared back at the orchard and the wind in the tops of the trees. In his mind’s eye, he was back in the valley that led to the hills resembling a woman’s breasts. It was sunset in the valley, and in the gathering dusk, he began the ascent of the first hill in a series he would have to traverse before he could slip off his pack and his rifle and his steel pot and lie down and sleep in a dry hole free of mosquitoes and snakes and dream about a Eurasian girl who lived on a sampan by the shore of the China Sea.

  He never saw the stick grenade that arced end over end out of the shadows and bounced off a tree trunk and exploded five feet from him and killed two other marines and blew Clete down the hillside. Nor was he able to reason his way through the events taking place around him—the automatic-weapons fire that looked like flashes from an electric power line dancing in the darkness, somebody yelling for the blooker, the throp of helicopter blades, and the rattle of a Gatling gun that was ripping foliage and geysers of dirt out of the hillside.

  Everything taking place around him no longer seemed his concern, because he knew he was about to die. The sensation was not as he had imagined it. He felt as though he were being drawn back through a tunnel, one that was translucent and pink and blue, a place he had been before. It was the birth canal, he was sure of that, and on the other end of it, he thought he could see a warm and lighted presence that should have been his birthright but had been denied him during his time on earth.

  Then the face of a navy corpsman was looking into his. “Don’t go dinky-dow on me,” the corpsman said. “Hang on to your ass. We’re going for the ride of your life. Then you’re the fuck out of here, man. We’re talking about the Golden Gate in ’68. Just stay with me.”

  The corpsman wiped Clete’s face and pulled loose his flak vest, then rolled him onto a poncho liner and dragged him like a human sled all the way to the bottom of the hill.

  Clete lay on his back inside the swale and looked up at the stars. He could hear Gretchen shooting and smell the grass and the fertilizer in a flower bed and the cold that seemed to be blowing down from a snowfield high up in the mountains.

  “We never made it back from over there,” he said. “We thought we did, but they body-bagged us and forgot to tell us about it. They stole our lives, Dave.”

  Then he rolled on his side and vomited in the grass.

  I WIPED HIS MOUTH with my handkerchief and brushed the hair out of his eyes. “You can’t leave me, Clete,” I said.

  “Who said I am?”

  “You were talking out of your head,” I said. “Vietnam is yesterday’s box score. Forget Vietnam and everything that happened over there.”

  “I was talking about ’Nam? I don’t think I was. I was having a dream, that’s all.”

  “We have to go, partner. Can you make it?”

  “Go where?”

  “To hook up with Gretchen and Alf. We need to nail these guys as they come out of the orchard. We still have Surrette to deal with.”

  He widened his eyes as though trying to bring the world back into focus. “Dave, I know I dropped at least three of those assholes. This is what you’re not hearing. There are a lot more of them than you think. I saw them coming through the grass.”

  “There’s no grass out there, Clete. You’re losing it. Come on, get up!”

  He pulled the AR-15 off my shoulder and tried to stand, then fell sideways, like a drunk. “I think I’m a couple of quarts down.”

  “That’s okay. You’re doing fine,” I said. I got his arm over my shoulders again and hooked one hand under the back of his belt and pulled him up. “We’ve been in a lot worse shape than this.”

  “When?”

  I couldn’t think of the instance. We headed across the lawn into the shadow of the stone house. I could see Gretchen and Alafair coming toward us. In the background, the lake was green-black, the rocks in the shallows illuminated with a strange light that had no source, the wind blowing whitecaps onto the shore, each as defined as a brushstroke in an oil painting.

  “Things are happening here that aren’t real, Dave,” Clete said. “It scares the hell out of me.”

  “We don’t have anything to be afraid of,” I said.

  I think he tried to laugh. I held him tighter, pulling up on his belt, my knees starting to fail.

  GRETCHEN WAS HOLDING the Mauser bolt-action with one hand across her shoulder. She grabbed Clete’s other arm. “Let’s get him into your truck,” she said.

  “Screw that,” Clete said.

  “Do what I tell you, big boy,” she said.

  “We’re cut off, Dave,” Alafair said. “They’ve got a couple of vehicles parked across the drive.”

  “Is there anybody in those sailboats?” I said.

  “I couldn’t raise anyone. I went down there twice,” she said. “Somebody cut the phone line to the bar.”

  “Surrette?” I said.

  “I don’t know. What do you want to do?” she said.

  “Did y’all see an orange pickup on the road, one with a camper in the bed?” I said.

  “We
saw some headlights stop on the road,” Gretchen said. “You think that’s Wyatt Dixon’s truck?”

  “I guess he doesn’t own the only orange pickup in West Montana,” I said.

  “We have too many hurt people here. We’ve got to get off the dime,” she said.

  “We’re in a box,” I said. “That’s the long and short of it. Our advantage is that they have to come to us. We’ve also put a dent in their numbers.”

  “How many of them are there?” Alafair asked.

  “No more than a handful,” I said.

  Clete was sitting on the bumper of Gretchen’s truck, bent forward, his head down. “Wrong,” he said without looking up.

  “Clete saw more men than I did,” I said.

  “Dave, look!” Alafair said, pointing up the slope.

  I don’t know where they came from. I could see flashlights moving down the slope on either side of the property. I had no idea who they were or how they got there, if they worked for Caspian Younger or not. I was no longer sure that anything I saw was there.

  “Give me the AR-15,” Clete said, his head on his chest. “I dropped my piece on the lawn.”

  Gretchen squeezed my arm tightly, her face close to mine. “Time to bust some caps, Dave. We’ll figure all this out later,” she said. She picked up the AR-15 and left Clete the Mauser.

  She was right. We were outnumbered, cut off from the highway, and flanked, with the lake at our back.

  “Come on, Dave, call it,” Gretchen said.

  I could see Molly and Albert and the two girls on the back steps of the house, and I could see Felicity Louviere sleeping in the front seat of Gretchen’s pickup. Clete could hardly move. Blood had run from his side all the way to the knee of his trousers. I felt at a total loss.

  “Take it to them,” I said.

  “Do what?” Alafair said.

  “We go right down the middle,” I said. “If Caspian Younger wants a fight, let’s give it to him.”

  By anyone’s reckoning, it was a foolish idea, perhaps one that had its origins in medieval romance or Henry V’s address to his troops before the siege at Agincourt. But there are times when the probability of death in your life is so great that you step across a line and no longer fear it. I believe that was what happened to us as we stood close by a glacial lake where dinosaurs and mastodons once fed and played among the buttercups and ice lilies.