James Burke - Light of the World

The reversal of their situation was not over. Behind them, Tony Zappa picked himself up from the floor, wobbled once or twice, and charged through the side window, smashing through the curtain and glass, the chair on his back, landing on the gravel slope behind the building. Upon impact, the chair splintered into sticks, and in seconds he was running across the rocks along the river’s edge, his wrists still taped behind him, his ripped shirt streaming in rags.

“Time to get out of Dodge, Wyatt,” she said.

“I got to tell you something, Miss Gretchen. I don’t like what you done, snapping the gun at your head like that. It froze my heart up. You shouldn’t ought to do that, even if you was pretending. You was pretending, right?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “You’re a good fellow, Wyatt. Come on, I’ll buy you dinner.”

His face resembled a clay sculpture, his glasslike eyes absent of any emotion she could detect. She held her eyes on his. “Something wrong?” she asked.

“That smile of yours, it’s the light of the world,” he said. “You got the prettiest smile in the history of smiles, woman.”

Growing up in the old Irish Channel, down by Tchoupitoulas, Clete Purcel heard older boys and men share their knowledge about the opposite sex. He heard the same wisdom in the Marine Corps and from fellow cops and any number of newsmen and barroom personalities and frequenters of pool rooms and sports parlors. All spoke with authority about the rewards and perils of romance and gave the listener the sense that they had women of every stripe at their disposal. These great authorities on sexual relationships knew every detail about the joys of copulation as well as some of the pitfalls, which they reduced to the cynical and succinct statements that entertain the readers of pulp fiction and please those who have the thinking powers of earthworms. Here are a few bits of bedroom wisdom passed by these wise and worldly men:

1) Don’t go to bed with a woman who has more problems than you.

2) Divorcées and widows can’t get enough.

3) Catholic girls are better in the sack because they’re full of guilt and stay on rock and roll right down to the finish line.

4) Black women have more powerful libidos than white women and are always eager to get it on with white men.

5) Old ladies make outstanding mistresses because they are not only mature but their parts are tender and they are ever so grateful (this observation was made by Benjamin Franklin).

This is the counsel that millions of men and boys have heard and probably on occasion taken seriously. Once in a long while, inside a late-night bar or the cab of a long-haul semi or a foxhole when trip flares are floating down over a piece of third-world moonscape, you might hear a cautionary word connected to reality. Someone who has strayed from his marital vows, or betrayed his lover’s trust, or destroyed his family or someone else’s, will describe to you in painful detail the nightmare that can be yours if you make one wrongheaded decision.

If the errant lover or husband is willing to tell you everything, he will confess his naïveté. He will say he had no idea how many lives would be affected by his decision. He will acknowledge that none of the players was either all good or all bad but were little more than children. This is not a welcome revelation for those men who wish to feel that the cuckold precipitated his own fate or that he was saving the adulterous wife from an abusive marriage or that he was lured into the situation. It’s no fun to discover you’ve been swindled. It’s even worse when you discover that the swindler is you.

Clete arranged to meet Felicity at the stone cabin on Sweathouse Creek Sunday evening and got there before she did. The sun was gone, and the air was cold and smelled of the creek and the lichen on the stone walls of the canyon. When she arrived, she was wearing a long dark dress with tiny white flowers and a white lace hem, and a knitted white sweater and a tiny hat like a woman from the early twentieth century would wear. Her hand was shaking when she turned the key in the plated lock on the door.

“Are you okay?” he asked when they were inside.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “We just made our first visit to Angel’s grave. Something happened that really bothers me. Caspian cried. I’ve never seen him do that.”

“That’s the way people behave in those situations,” he replied. Those situations? They were talking about the murder of a child. What was he saying?

“Caspian never shows his feelings,” she said. “He always has this little smile on his face, like he knows something you don’t.”

“The reason I wanted to talk to you, Felicity—”

“You don’t have to tell me. It’s written all over you. You made a mistake. I’m a nice lady and deserve better. We have to be mature people about this and be objective and say good-bye. Blah, blah, blah. Usually, men choose a restaurant to say these things so the woman can’t yell and throw things.”

“I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to tell you how much I like you, and like being with you, and like the way you talk and carry yourself. You’re grieving over your daughter, and a guy like me seems like a safe harbor for a little while. I don’t want to hurt you, that’s all. You don’t know my history. Dave and I put some guys down real hard. They’re not coming back.”

“Why did you want to meet?”

“Because I want to know why you haven’t split from your husband. Or maybe I wondered if you want to split with him now. I’m not good at figuring things out sometimes.”

She sat down on a cloth-covered couch by the far wall. Through the window behind her, Clete could see the limbs of a cottonwood thrashing in the wind and the flicker of lightning on the canyon wall. “When I married Caspian, I was a good girl. I was mad at my father for going to South America and getting himself killed. I strayed sometimes, but I felt sorry about it later and tried to do right. Caspian said he loved me and he’d never slept with another woman. I didn’t believe him, but after a while I thought he was telling the truth. Caspian’s money could have bought him any woman he wanted, but the only love he cared about was the one he couldn’t have — the love of his father.”

“I can relate to that,” Clete said. “Except you got to grow up and stop resenting people for what they did to you when you were a kid. You got a drink?”

“Are you talking about me resenting my father? Is that why we’re out here?”

“No, I just need a drink. What do you have?”

“There’s some Bacardi and Coca-Cola in the refrigerator. Why don’t you lay off it for a while?”

“I don’t feel like laying off it. Go on with what you were saying.”

“Oh, Clete, I feel like such a fool when I talk this way,” she said, putting her hands in her lap and lowering her head. “I told you I was angry at my father, but the truth is, I loved him and I was proud of the name he gave me and I wanted to be brave like the woman who died in the arena. I used to go to church and try to be charitable toward people, and I thought marrying Caspian would be wonderful and we’d live in all the magical places we talked about. I slept around and I was selfish, and any criticism others make of me is justified. What bothers me most about Angel’s death is that she’s dead and I’m alive.”

Clete was putting ice and four inches of rum in a glass of Coca-Cola, trying to concentrate on what she was saying. From the kitchen, he could not see her face, but her tone had changed — it held a plaintive element that was making him feel worse and worse. A storm had moved out of the south end of the Bitterroot Valley, and he could feel the barometer dropping and the air turning colder outside.