James Burke - Light of the World

“My father was such a good person that he took care of everybody except his family,” she said.

“Beg your pardon?”

“He wasn’t happy unless he was wearing sackcloth and ashes for other people’s sins. He named me for Saint Felicity.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“She was the slave of a Roman aristocrat named Perpetua. Perpetua kept a record of the events leading up to her and Felicity’s deaths in the arena. It’s the only account that we have by a victim of the persecutions.”

“I don’t know much about that stuff. From what I remember, your dad was pretty religious.”

“If that’s what you call it.” She pushed back his sleeve from his watch and glanced at the time. “I wonder if each one of us is allotted a certain number of days. We’re here, then we’re not. We look back and wonder what we’ve done with our lives and think about all the opportunities we let slip by. Do you ever feel like you lived your life for somebody else?”

“I was always getting in trouble. I didn’t have time to think about things like that. I’m not too profound a guy.”

“I think you’re a much more complex man than you pretend.” She rubbed her finger on the dial of his watch.

He could feel the heat in the back of his neck, a tingling sensation in his palms. He poured the remainder of his whiskey into his beer and drank it. It slid down inside him like an old friend, lighting the corners of his mind, stilling his heart, allowing him to smile as though he were not beset with a problem of conscience that, in the morning, could fasten him wrist and ankle on a medieval rack.

“I just barely made a plane to El Sal before I went down on a murder beef,” he said. “My liver probably looks like a block of Swiss cheese with a skin disease. Dave is the only cop from the old days who’ll hang out with me. I’m not being humble. I worked for the Mob in Vegas and Reno. I’ve done stuff I wouldn’t tell a corpse.”

“If you’re thinking about my marital status, my husband is the most corrupt, selfish man I’ve ever known.”

“Maybe he had a good teacher.” He saw the look on her face. “I’m talking about his father, Mr. Younger. He doesn’t just vote against politicians he disagrees with, he smears their names.”

“Caspian couldn’t carry his father’s briefcase.”

“Why’d you marry him?”

“I was the little match girl looking through the window. I took the easy way.”

Her fingers rested on the bar, inches from his hand. Her nails were tiny and clipped, the bones in her wrist as delicate as a kitten’s. Whenever she lifted her eyes to his, her mouth became like a compressed flower, the black mole at the corner a reminder of how perfect her complexion was. Her blouse hung loosely from her shoulders, and he could see the sunlight from the door reflecting on the tops of her breasts. He wanted to reach out and touch the mole.

“I’m alone, Mr. Purcel,” she said. “My daughter is dead. My husband is a satyr. Think ill of me if you wish. I don’t apologize for what I am.”

“I don’t think you ought to apologize to anybody. I think you’re a nice lady. Maybe you don’t like New Orleans, but you don’t know how beautiful your accent is. It’s like a song.”

“I haven’t eaten supper yet. That’s why I didn’t want to drink a lot,” she said. “Have you eaten, Mr. Purcel?”

“You want to go to the Depot? It’s right down the street. We can eat on the terrace. In the evening you can see the deer up on the hills above the train tracks. I always like this time of day.”

“You really worked for the Mafia?”

“Just one guy. His name was Sally Dio. Sometimes people called him Sally Deuce or Sally Ducks. Somebody put sand in the fuel tank of his airplane. He survived the crash, but he was turned into a french fry. Dave and I ran into him again a few years back.”

“Where is he now?”

“Sally Dee caught the car to Jericho. That’s an expression people in the life used in New Orleans years ago.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Jericho is a dead city. If you got on the streetcar to Jericho, you weren’t coming back.”

Maybe, he thought, he would scare her and she would go away. She got up from the stool and pushed a strand of hair away from her eye, her profile as perfect as a miniature inside a Victorian locket. She tripped in the doorway and fell against him, then blushed and apologized and walked with him into the twilight, neither touching the other.

They did not pay attention to a man leaning against a parking meter down the street. He was smoking a pipe and gazing at the freight cars pulling out of the train yard. His hair was oiled and combed back over the tops of his ears. He puffed on his pipe and let the smoke curl out of his mouth into the breeze. He seemed to take a special pleasure in the purple cast of the hills, backdropped by a sky that was the blue of a robin’s egg. He did not seem to notice Clete and the woman as they walked past him into the restaurant called the Depot.

A locomotive backed into the train yard, pushing a long row of boxcars ahead of it, the couplings clanging with such force that chaff from the boxcar floors powdered in the sun’s afterglow. The man leaning against the meter tapped the bowl of his pipe on his hand, ignoring the live cinders that stuck to his skin. Then he put away his pipe and entered the restaurant through the terrace and took a seat at the bar, staring with self-satisfaction at the face he saw in the mirror.

“What are you having?” the bartender asked.

“A glass of ice water and a menu,” the man said.

“You got it. Visiting?”

“Why do you think that?”

“Saw your tag through the window. How do you like Montana?”

“The state tree of Kansas is a telephone pole,” the man said. “Does that tell you something?”

Two hours earlier, Gretchen had gone up to the main house and thrown a pebble against Alafair’s screen on the third floor. “Want to take a ride?” she said.

“Where to?” Alafair replied.

“A dump by the old train station.”

“What for?”

“To find Clete.”

“Call him on his cell.”

“He turned it off. If he’s doing what I think he is, he doesn’t plan to turn it on again.”

“Leave him alone, Gretchen. He’s a grown man.”

“Except he needs someone to strap a cast-iron codpiece on his stiff red-eye.”

“Do you know how bad that sounds?”

“I heard him talking on the phone to Love Younger’s daughter-in-law. Are you coming or not?”

They drove in Alafair’s Honda to the saloon where Clete sometimes drank. Gretchen got out and went inside while Alafair waited in the car, the motor running. Gretchen came back out and got in the car and closed the door. “The bartender said he left with a woman five minutes ago.”

“Gretchen, don’t get mad at me. What’s the harm if he’s with this woman?”

“Duh, she’s married? Duh, the Younger family would like to turn Montana into a gravel pit?”

“Sometimes Clete drinks at the Depot.”

“I thought he only drank in dumps,” Gretchen said.

“It was James Crumley’s hangout.”

“Who?”

“The crime novelist. He passed away a few years back. Can I make a suggestion?”

“Go ahead.”

Alafair pulled away from the curb. “Ease up on your old man. He thinks the world of you. He’s easily hurt by what you say.”

“So don’t hurt your father’s feelings, even if he’s about to walk in front of a train?”

“You’re a hard sell,” Alafair said.

They drove up the street and stopped in front of the restaurant. Gretchen went inside by herself. She looked in the dining room, then went into the bar and gazed through the French doors at the people eating on the terrace. A man hunched on a stool a few feet from her had just said something about the state tree of Kansas. Through a door pane, she could see Clete sitting with a small woman at a linen-covered table under a canopy stretched over the terrace. The woman had a shawl across her shoulders. A candle flickered on the table, lighting her hair and mouth and eyes. She seemed captivated by a story Clete was telling while he drank from a tumbler of ice and whiskey and cherries and sliced oranges, both hands lifting in the air when he made a point, the ice rattling in the glass. Gretchen was breathing hard through her nose as though she had walked up a steep hill.