James Burke - Light of the World

“I don’t know. I don’t smell anything.”

“It’s very strong. Check the bottom of your shoes.”

He could hear himself breathing, his irritability climbing like a tarantula up his spinal cord. Her mouth made him think of a plumber’s helper, one smeared with lipstick. “Who’s home?” he said.

“Ralph’s splitting wood. The girls went to the movies. Why do you want to know?”

“I thought we’d have a meeting of the minds.”

“You’re acting strangely. I think I should have a look at your cheek. You may already have an infection. Are you running a fever?”

“Don’t touch me.”

“Well, I never.”

“Do you have some baling wire?”

“Ralph probably has some in the shed.”

“Yes, folksy hinterland people would always have some baling wire lying around, wouldn’t they? Ralphie splinters the wood, and then you cord it up for the winter. That’s what folksy salt-of-the-earth people do.”

“What has gotten into you?” she said.

“A little of this, a little of that,” he said, dipping his hand into his overnight bag. “Mostly, I just don’t like the way you look. Or the way you talk. Or your stupid expression.”

He lifted up a .22 auto outfitted with a suppressor and popped a solitary round through the middle of her forehead, the hole no bigger than the circumference of an eraser on a wood pencil. She went straight down on the floor in a heap, like a puppet whose strings had been released by the puppeteer. That was how they always went down when they weren’t expecting it. Not like in the movies, when the shooting victim flew backward through a glass window.

He studied her surprised expression and the pool of blood forming on the floor, then put away the semi-auto and picked up the brass and stepped out on the landing. “Hey, Ralph!” he called down. “Can you bring some baling wire up here? The wife wants you to help hang something.”

The husband snicked his ax into the stump and gazed up at the landing, squinting against the sunlight. “Be there in a jiff, Geta. We wondered where you were,” he said. “I told the wife not to worry, you were doing the Lord’s work. Glad you’re back home safe and sound.”

After Bertha Phelps drove away, Clete went down to the cabin, and I went back up on the hill, trying to retrace the route Asa Surrette used to get on and off Albert’s property. It was 3:48 P.M. and shady and cool inside the trees, but on the opposite side of the valley, I could see harebells and asters and paintbrush and mock orange and sunflowers and bee balm on the hillsides, where the grass was green and tall and the trees were few because of the thin soil layer. Then I saw Clete laboring up the grade toward me, his porkpie hat on, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his right hand, his shoulders as heavy-looking as a bag of rocks.

“I thought you could use some company,” he said, sweating, his breath coming hard. He sat down on a boulder and wiped his brow. “I guess I still haven’t acclimated to the thin air.”

“Maybe you ought to put the hooch away today,” I said.

Mistake.

He pulled the cork and upended the bottle, one eye fixed on my face. “See, no problem. The world hasn’t ended,” he said. “Marse Daniel never lets me down.”

“Who are you kidding?”

“I told you, I needed a drink. So I took one. I think my liver is shot. I take one hit and it’s like mainlining. That means I drink less.” He waited for me to argue with him, but I didn’t. “What do you think you’re going to find up here?” he asked.

“The last time Surrette was on the hill, he tried to lead Gretchen into a bear trap,” I said. “I followed his trail over the crest to the far side. His tracks led to a rock outcropping, then disappeared. He had to go south to get to the highway. There are two or three deer trails that would have taken him there, but his tracks weren’t on them. I don’t get it.”

“What if he headed north?”

“He’d end up in a blind canyon. It was night. He would have to climb out of it in the dark. Where would his vehicle be?”

“What’s in the canyon?”

“Three or four houses. People Albert knows,” I replied.

Clete took another hit off the bottle. I could see a chain of tiny air bubbles sliding up the neck as he drank. He set the bottle on his leg. “I shouldn’t do this in front of you. But I’m not doing too good today, and I need it.”

“It doesn’t bother me.”

“Not at all?” he said.

“Maybe a little. Like a thought that’s buried in the unconscious. Like an old girlfriend winking at you on the street corner.”

“That bad?”

“It comes and goes. I don’t think about it as often; I dream about it. The dreams are always nightmares. Sometimes I can’t wake myself up, and I walk around thinking I’m drunk.”

“How often do you dream about it?”

“Every third night, about four A.M.”

“All these years?”

“Except when I was back on the dirty boogie. Then I didn’t have to dream. My life was a nightmare twenty-four hours a day,” I said.

He stared through the trees into the sunlight. Down below, Albert was watering the grass. I could hear birds singing and chipmunks clattering in the rocks. I thought of all the days Clete and I had hiked through woods to get to an isolated pond in the Atchafalaya Basin. I thought about diving the wreck of a German sub that drifted up and down the Louisiana coast, and knocking down ducks inside a blind on Whiskey Bay, and trolling for marlin south of Key Largo, the bait bouncing in our wake. I thought of all the Cubans and Cajuns and Texas fisherpeople we had known along the southern rim of the United States, and the open-air oyster bars we had eaten in and the boats on which we had hauled tarpons as thick as logs over the gunwales. What is the sum total of a man’s life? I knew the answer, and it wasn’t complicated. At the bottom of the ninth, you count up the people you love, both friends and family, and you add their names to the fine places you’ve been and the good things you’ve done, and you have it.

Clete stood up and dusted off the seat of his trousers. “Let’s hike on up a bit higher,” he said.

“Where’s Gretchen?”

“I wish I knew. When it comes to her old trade, she’s a loner. She said something I hadn’t thought about. That Surrette is going to come apart.”

“Why?” I asked.

“She’s known guys like him, guys the Mob took out. She said they’re all anal-retentives. They’ve got a master plan. When it doesn’t work out, their world goes to shit.”

“What’s Surrette’s master plan?”

“Breaking Felicity.”

I didn’t look at his face. The implication in his voice was enough. I heard him lift the bottle again, the whiskey sloshing inside the neck.

“Sometimes you have to keep an empty space in your head and not let the wrong thoughts get in it,” I said.

“That’s why I drink this. It’s why I need a little slack sometimes, noble mon,” he said.

I heard him take another hit and squeak the cork tight in the bottle.

We walked up the hill, me in front, angling toward the crest in a northwesterly direction. The new grass was coming up between the winter thatch, and in places where a spring had leaked down the slope, I could see the sharply defined tracks of deer and at least one canine.

“Is that a wolf track?” Clete said.

“I think it is.”

“That’s another thing that’s weird,” he said. “Surrette comes and goes and doesn’t seem to give the wolves any thought.”

“They’re brothers-in-arms?”

“I didn’t say that. Don’t pretend it’s not weird, though. I don’t feel easy out here unless I’ve got my piece.”