James Burke - Light of the World

He climbed down from the fence, favoring one foot. He clasped the neck of the beer bottle with three fingers and tilted it to his mouth and drank until it was empty. Then he stuck it in one coat pocket and picked the empty off the grass and stuck it in his other pocket. He winked at me. “See, I always keep my word,” he said.

I was wrong about Wyatt Dixon. If this man could be placed in a category, I had no idea what it was.

I couldn’t blame Clete for what he did next. He had never done well when he left South Louisiana. Most GIs hated Vietnam and its corruption and humid weather and the stink of buffalo feces in its rice paddies. Not Clete. The banyan and palm trees, the clouds of steam rising off a rain forest, the French colonial architecture, the neon-lit backstreet bars of Saigon, a sudden downpour clicking on clusters of philodendron and banana fronds in a courtyard, the sloe-eyed girls who beckoned from a balcony, an angelus bell ringing at six A.M., all of these things could have been postcards mailed to him from the city of his birth.

For many people, New Orleans was a song that sank beneath the waves. For Clete, New Orleans was a state of mind that would never change, a Caribbean port that practiced old-world manners, its pagan culture disguised by a thin veneer of Christianity. The dialect sounded more like Brooklyn than the South, because most of its blue-collar people were descended from Italian and Irish immigrants. The gentry often had accents like Walker Percy or Robert Penn Warren and had an iambic cadence in their speech that on occasion could turn an ordinary conversation into a sonnet.

People referred to “lunch” as “dinner.” “Big-mouth bass” were “green trout.” The “esplanade” was the “neutral ground.” A “snowball” was always spelled as “sno’ball.” The street Burgundy was pronounced as “Bur gun dy.” “New Orleans” was pronounced as “New Or Lons” and never, under any circumstances, not even at gunpoint, “Nawlens.”

Sometimes in the early-morning hours, Clete rode the St. Charles streetcar to the end of the line in Carrollton, the fog puffing in clouds from the live oaks that formed a canopy over the neutral ground. Then he rode the car back to Canal and walked through the Quarter to his office on St. Ann and never told anybody, his secretary included, where he had been.

Clete practiced a private religion and had his own pew inside a cathedral no one else knew about. He never told others of his pain, nor would he allow himself to be treated as a victim. He hid his scars, made light of his problems, and despised those who preyed on the weak and those who championed wars but avoided fighting when it was their turn. You could say his value system was little different from that of Geoffrey Chaucer’s good knight. I suspect there was a bit of Saint Francis in him as well.

I can’t say exactly why he was drawn to Felicity Louviere, but I have an idea. She was diminutive and seemed never to have been exposed to a harsh light, like a nocturnal flower that needed to be protected from the sun. The black mole by her mouth seemed less an imperfection than an invitation for a man to lean down and kiss her. Her little-girl vulnerability did not fit with her robust figure and the dark and lustrous thickness of her hair and the mercurial changes in her manner, one moment grief-ridden, one moment seductive, one moment angry, perhaps because her father lost his life while trying to do good for others and left his daughter to founder.

Maybe the attraction was her accent, one you hear only in uptown New Orleans, an accent so singular and melodic that actors and actresses can seldom imitate it. Or maybe it was the fact that she was named by her father for a brave woman who died in a Roman arena.

Felicity Louviere was a mystery, and therein lay her attraction for Clete Purcel. She represented his memories of old New Orleans — alluring, profligate, addictive, filled with self-destructive impulses, her beauty as fragile as that of a white rose with a black spot on one petal. The greatest irony of Felicity’s contradictions was her name. Did she, like her namesake, have the strength and resolve of a martyr? Did she have the courage of Felicity’s fellow martyr, Perpetua, who pointed the sword of her executioner into her side? Or was she a deceiver, a female acolyte of the Great Whore of Babylon?

Clete got the call on his cell phone early Saturday morning, while he was eating breakfast at the McDonald’s in Lolo. “Did I wake you up?” she said.

“No,” he replied. “But whatever it is, I don’t think it’s too cool we see each other.”

“I’m scared.”

“About what?”

“It’s Caspian. I always knew he had problems, but this is different. I can see it in his eyes. He’s involved with something really bad.”

“Can you be a little more specific?”

“I don’t know. Maybe it has to do with gambling. He used to lose tens of thousands a night until Love made him go to Gamblers Anonymous.”

“What, he’s flying to Vegas or something?”

“No, he’s scared about something. He went to meet someone yesterday and came home drunk. Caspian never drinks.”

“Who’d he meet?”

“He won’t say. I heard him talking to Love in the den. He asked if there was a hell.”

Clete got up from the booth and went outside with the phone. A semi was making a wide turn onto the two-lane highway that led up the long grade to Lolo Pass and the Idaho line. “My daughter had just gotten off the plane that crashed west of Missoula two days ago,” he said. “The pilot was a member of the Sierra Club. My daughter is making a film about the oil companies that want to drill next to Glacier Park.”

“You think the plane was sabotaged?”

“What’s your opinion?”

“Love Younger doesn’t blow up planes.”

“I didn’t say he did.”

“Caspian? He wouldn’t know a can of 3-In-One from Spindletop.”

“I got the impression his father had a way of rubbing his nose in it.”

“I need to see you.”

He took the phone away from his ear and looked at the truck shifting down for the long pull up the grade. Don’t do it, a voice said. You can’t help her. She married into the Younger family of her own free will.

“Are you there?” she asked.

“Yes,” he said.

“I know you have every reason to distrust me. But I’m telling you the truth. There is something truly evil happening in our lives.”

“Where are you?” he asked.

“Not far. We have a camp on Sweathouse Creek.”

“I got to ask you something. Your husband came to our place and said some ugly things. Did you know the governor of Louisiana, the one who went to prison?”

“I met him once at a political event. Why?”

“Your husband said you got it on with him.”

“That’s because my husband is paranoid and a liar.”

His head was bursting. He let out his breath, widening his eyes, unable to sort out his thoughts. “He said you were a trophy hunter.”

“Believe what you want. Caspian is a sick, sad man. I’m afraid, and I need help.”

He hesitated, his head throbbing. “Give me directions,” he said.

The cabin was built of field stones on a whiskey-colored, tree-shaded creek at the base of the Bitterroot Mountains. The smoke from the chimney flattened in the breeze and disappeared inside the blueness of a canyon that didn’t see full sunlight until midday. Sometimes there were bighorn sheep high up on the cliffs of the canyon, and in the fall, the sky would have the radiance and texture of blue silk and be filled with red and yellow leaves blowing from a place on the mountaintop that no one could see.