James Burke - Light of the World

“Here, I’ll get it,” she said. She twisted the key and opened the door, her shoulder brushing against his arm. She turned her face up to his. He could feel his manhood flare inside him. Her mouth was like a rose, her hair blow-dried and so thick and lovely that he wanted to tangle his fingers in it. “Clete?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“You like me, don’t you?”

“Do I? I’ve got a fire truck driving around inside my head.”

“My daughter and my father are dead. I don’t have anyone.”

She let her arms hang at her sides and leaned her forehead directly into his chest, as though in total surrender to him and the level of failure that characterized her life.

One hour later, as he lay beside her, all his good intentions gone and his sexual energies exhausted, he thought about a story he had read as a boy in the old city library on St. Charles. The story was about Charlemagne and Roland on their way to Roncevaux. He wondered if they and their knights ever gave heed to the horns echoing off the canyon walls that surrounded them, or if they galloped onward through the cool blueness of the morning, beside a tea-colored stream, inside the rhythmic sweep of the wind in the trees, never realizing that the littered field began with a romantic quest, one that was as inviting and lovely and addictive as the grace to be found inside a woman’s thighs.

I have never laid strong claim on rationality, in fact have often felt that its value is overrated. Let’s face it, life is easier if we maintain a semblance of reasonable behavior and hide some of our eccentricities and not say more than is necessary in our dealings with others. The same applies to our actions. Why attract attention? No one takes an accordion band to a deer hunt.

Like most people, I wonder why I don’t take my own advice.

The cave behind Albert’s house began to bother me. Had it provided shelter to Asa Surrette? Was the perversion of Scripture on the wall of no consequence? Was it not a hijacking of a Judeo-Christian culture on which most of our ethos is based, in this instance a hijacking by a subhuman abomination who should have been hosed off the bowl thirty seconds after his birth?

I found two empty wine bottles in Albert’s trash and filled them with gasoline I kept in a five-gallon can inside a steel lockbox welded to the bed of my pickup truck. I corked both bottles and carried them and the gas can up the hillside to the old logging road that traversed the mountain above Albert’s house. A doe with two fawns bounced through the trees ahead of me, flicking their tails straight up, the white underside exposed.

The area around the cave entrance had remained undisturbed. Inside the overhang, I could see the message. I began heaping deadwood and leaves and pine needles and big chunks of a worm-eaten stump that was as soft and dry as rotted cork, shoving it against the wall that contained the pirated lines.

I poured gasoline on the pile and set the can twenty feet from the cave opening, then lit a paper match and threw it inside the cave. The flame spread quickly over the fuel, climbing up the wall and flattening on the roof. Then I picked up the first wine bottle and flung it end over end into the fire. It broke against a fallen boulder and showered against the wall. Flames leaped from the cave, curling over the rim, scorching the overhang and singeing the grass and mushrooms that grew on top of it. I stepped back and tossed the second bottle inside. It landed on the deadwood and, seconds later, exploded from the heat rather than the impact. The fire was soon out of control, twisting in circular fashion, the flames feeding on themselves, spreading deeper into the cave, where there was probably a chimneylike opening drawing cold oxygen into the mixture of organic fuel and gasoline.

I could feel the heat on my face and arms and smell a stench that was like the odor of pack rat nests burning. I heard a sound behind me and looked over my shoulder and saw Albert laboring up the hill, sweating, his flannel shirt open on his chest, a fire extinguisher swinging from his hand. “What in the Sam Hill are you doing?” he said, out of breath.

“I thought I’d clean up the cave.”

“Why didn’t you napalm the whole mountain while you were at it?” He pulled the pin on the extinguisher’s release lever and sprayed the rim of the cave, then the inside. Huge clouds of white smoke billowed from the opening and floated through the treetops. “You know how to do it, Dave. What’s got into you?”

“I believe a genuinely evil man was up here, Albert. I believe he has no right to take language out of Scripture and deface the earth with it.”

“Sit down a minute.”

“What for?”

“I want to talk to you.”

I wasn’t up to one of Albert’s philosophic sessions. He’d had chains on his ankles when he was seventeen and had belonged to the Industrial Workers of the World and had known Woody Guthrie and Cisco Houston. He’d followed the wheat harvest from the Texas Panhandle to southern Alberta and had been on a freighter that hit a mine in the Strait of Hormuz. He was a charitable and fine man, and I held him in the highest regard. There were also times when he could drive you crazy and make you want to throttle him.

“You were raised up in a superstitious culture,” he said. “When you let your imagination get the best of you, you start to see the devil’s hand at work in your life. The devil isn’t a man, Dave.”

“Then what is he?”

“Those goddamn corporations.”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“You’re going to whether you like it or not. They bust our unions and use coolie labor in China and buy every goddamn president we elect.”

“I can’t take this, Albert.”

“Those men who tried to kill Miss Gretchen were working for somebody. Who would that be? Satan or Love Younger?”

“A man like Younger doesn’t hire hit men.”

“You don’t know your enemy, Dave. You never did.”

“You want to translate that?”

“How’d your father die?”

“As the result of an accident. Don’t be using my old man in your polemics.”

He placed his hand on my shoulder. “All right, I won’t. But don’t hurt yourself like this. The enemy is flesh and blood, not a creature who wears a pentacle for a hat.”

I took the extinguisher and finished spraying the cave and the bushes around the entrance. “Better come have a look,” I said.

“What is it?” he said, getting to his feet.

“Check out the wall.”

He stood at the entrance, the smoke from the ash rising into his face, his eyes watering. “It’s an aberration caused by the heat,” he said.

I wanted to believe him, except in this case, I think Albert also had his doubts.

The message had probably been incised into the lichen with the point of a rock. The letters had not been cut much deeper than the moldy green patina. The intensity of the fire, augmented by two bottles of gasoline, should have burned the wall as clean as old bone. Instead, the letters were black and smoking, as though they had been seared into the stone with a branding iron.

“Don’t just walk away,” I said.

“I’m done with this foolishness, and I won’t discuss it with you or anybody else,” he replied. “Not now, not ever. You get yourself to a psychiatrist, Dave.”

At dawn on Sunday, Wyatt Dixon awoke to a sound that didn’t fit with either his dreams or the sounds he usually heard at daybreak. It was a sound like the pages of a book or magazine flipping in the breeze. Had he left a window open? No, the temperature had dropped last night, and he had shut and latched all of them. He sat up in bed and removed the sheathed bowie knife he kept under his pillow. He put on his jeans and limped barefoot and shirtless into the kitchen, his hair hanging in his face, his bad ankle wrapped with an elastic bandage.