James Burke - Light of the World

He set his Glock on the coffee table in the small living room and looked out at the vastness of the lake and the Swan Peaks rising like jagged tin in the south, and directly across from the cottage, a thickly wooded mountain that was black against a sky twinkling with stars. Just one week ago opportunities had been opening up for him right and left: He had money in the bank, a new van, and was reporting to one of the richest men in the United States. Then it all went south because of a girl named Gretchen Horowitz. An idle remark about her being butch, that’s all it was, and he got a shitload of grief dropped on his head. How about the uniformed deputy who wised off first? Why didn’t the girl go after him ?

He had not turned on the lights in the cottage. He got up from the sofa and went into the kitchen and took a bottle of milk from the refrigerator, then sat back down and uncapped a pint of brandy and mixed it with milk in a jelly glass and drank it in the dark. The leafy canopy of the birch trees was swaying in the moonlight, the shadows sliding back and forth on his lawn and porch. If Bill Pepper had learned any lesson in life, it was that terrible events always had small beginnings. His father had befriended a Negro vagabond and lost his life. The Watts riot had begun not because of police beating an innocent person but because a crowd had gathered when a patrolman arrested a black taxi driver who was DWI. Within days National Guardsmen were firing .30-caliber machine guns into apartment buildings and eighty-one people were dead and flames were rising from a quarter of the city.

He could have squared the situation with the girl even after molesting her. But he’d found out today his troubles over her were just beginning. She was important to people for reasons he didn’t understand. Who was she, anyway? Why were these other people coming down on him? They acted like he knew everything about her. The truth was, he knew nothing about her. If he’d known anything about her, he would have left her alone.

How had he let her get under his skin? How could he explain that to others when he couldn’t explain it to himself? She was attractive, certainly. No, that wasn’t the right word. She was beautiful. Her eyes were mysterious and alluring and a little dangerous and at the same time vulnerable. She was a young girl buried inside a body that was every man’s wet dream. He knew his thoughts were sick, but he couldn’t help desiring her. No man could. He was only human. Maybe his feelings were even fatherly, he told himself.

She’s getting to you again, he thought. You know the real reason for your fascination with her. She’s not afraid. Not of you, not of anyone, not of anything, not even death at the hands of a man inserting a knife blade between her neck and collar, inches from her carotid.

He emptied his glass and filled it again, this time not bothering to stir it, drinking the brandy as fast as he could get it down. He thought he heard a tree limb break and fall into the yard. Or was that the deer coming down to drink from the lake? He had told that cop and his daughter from Louisiana that he wanted to go back to Mobile. That was still a possibility, wasn’t it? His fellow white officers at the LAPD had never understood Bill Pepper’s attitude toward people of color. He had no resentment toward them; he felt comfortable in their midst and didn’t blame them because a deranged colored vagabond had killed his father. The group he couldn’t abide was white trash like Wyatt Dixon, the kind of man who visited his odium on other Southerners, the kind of man who reminded Bill Pepper of the alleyway he lived on in Macon.

He lit a cigarette and poured more brandy in his glass and watched it swirl inside the milk. He drank the glass almost to the bottom, hoping he could stop the process taking place in his head. What did the drunks at A.A. meetings call it? Mind racing? That was it. Your head seemed to explode, like a basketball with barbed wire wrapped around it. Something even more serious was happening inside Bill Pepper’s head. The world as he knew it was ending, the filmstrip ripping loose from the reel and snapping in front of the projector’s light, throwing one disjointed image after another onto the screen.

Where had it all gone wrong? Secretly, he knew the answer to his question, and the problem was not the girl. Rich people did not care about people like Bill Pepper. To them, cops had the same status as yardmen. He had played the fool with Love Younger, trying to ingratiate himself, violating every protocol of his profession, believing that Younger would give him a job as a security expert or even make him a personal assistant. In fact, men like Love Younger wouldn’t take the time to spit in your mouth if you were dying of thirst.

The wind was picking up outside, cutting long V’s across the surface of the lake. Again he heard a sudden crack and a cascading sound like a limb snapping from the trunk of a birch and falling against the side of the cottage. He had never been this afraid, and worse, for the first time in his life, the booze wasn’t working. His fear ate right through it, the way a hot skillet vaporizes a drop of water. He looked at his hands. They were shaking.

Write it down, a voice said. If they get you, leave something behind that tells people you didn’t deserve this. Tell them you’re Bill Pepper and you were old-school at LAPD and you wronged the Horowitz girl but you’re sorry and you even told her you’d like to look after her. Yes, tell them, Bill Pepper. Don’t go silently into that good night.

Where had he heard that line? Then he remembered. It came from a black prostitute who worked as an independent on South Vernon Avenue. She had cooked her head with crystal meth but was fascinated with books he had never heard of. She used to ball him for free and whisper lines of poetry to him while she spread herself on his thighs in the back of his cruiser in an alleyway behind a Vietnamese grocery. What a thing to remember, here on a lake in western Montana at the close of day. He remembered her with tenderness rather than lust and wondered if she was still alive. Or maybe it was Bill Pepper who had fried his mush and not the black prostitute and none of this was real.

Using only a penlight, he sat at the kitchen table and wrote these words on top of a flattened paper bag: Some guys think I’m tight with the Horowitz girl at Albert Hollister’s ranch. I’m not. I’ve used up nine of the twenty-four hours they gave me. If you find this and not my body, they got me. I’m sorry for what I did to that girl. As far as the rest of it is concerned, fuck it.

He signed his name and under it wrote his LAPD badge number. Up on the two-lane, a car slowed and then accelerated, its headlights bouncing off the trees and the mountainside that bordered the far side of the asphalt. Bill Pepper went into the yard, his Glock hanging from his hand, the wind cold on his face, a stray raindrop or two striking his skin. Farther down the shore, lights were burning in a house close to the water. The glow reflected on the waves sliding under a dock where a red canoe was tied. The sight of the occupied house and the canoe bobbing in the chop and the waves sliding on the sand cheered Bill Pepper up and made him wonder if he hadn’t been too pessimistic, too hard on himself, too quick to write off the rest of life.

He turned in a full circle, his arms stretched out like a bird’s wings. There were no cars on the two-lane, no one hiding in the trees, no powerboat approaching from the far side of the lake. He went back inside and turned on the kitchen light to show his absence of fear, then started in on a plate of fried chicken and deviled eggs that had been in the refrigerator all week. It was cold and delicious, and he ate it hungrily with his fingers, washing it down with milk, his melancholia finally lifting, his eye on his spinning rod in the corner. It wasn’t too late to fling a red-and-white-striped Mepps in the water, he told himself. The rainbow were in close to shore, down in the weeds, hiding from the pike. They fed by the moon and, at this time of evening, would hit anything he threw at them, bending the rod’s tip to the surface, stripping line off the reel. Yes, he thought, to hell with the girl, to hell with the guys who thought he knew something he didn’t, and to hell with his own foolish behavior. A man had a right to catch trout at moonrise on a Friday night.