James Burke - Light of the World

“Are you listening?” she said. “I always thought about death, even when I was a little girl. Then I met Caspian and thought we’d live in Hawaii or Malibu or Martha’s Vineyard. He asked me to sign a prenuptial agreement and said it was because of his father and his father’s distrustful and stingy ways. I should have known better, I guess. We were happy, even though I couldn’t have children. I thought, after we adopted Angel, we’d be a real family. That’s not how it turned out.”

“That’s why you adopted her?”

“No, it was Caspian’s idea. That’s when I thought he had a kinder and more loving side. It’s what I thought today when he cried at her grave.”

Clete took a long drink. He was standing in the kitchen under the light fixture, unable to take the glass from his mouth, his shadow like a pool of ink around his feet. He drank until the glass was almost empty, wishing he could melt and seep through the cracks in the floor and disappear into the wind and rain starting to streak the windows. A bolt of lightning struck somewhere up on the mountain, the rocks and ponderosas and larch trees in the canyon trembling yellow and gray and shadowing against the canyon walls.

“You regret getting involved with me?” he asked.

“No, not at all. Sit down next to me. Please.”

“I got to have a refill.”

“No one can drink that much alcohol.”

“I can. I’ve made a lifetime study of it. Did you ever try to leave him?”

“And go where?”

“To the state employment office, if nowhere else.”

“I haven’t explained myself very well. I was always afraid of death. When people left me, I felt as though I’d died. It was like being inside a dark house that didn’t have any doors. You ever felt that way?”

“You’ve heard about the Serenity Prayer, right? I use the short version: ‘Fuck it.’ ”

“Except it doesn’t work that well, does it?”

“When that doesn’t, this does,” he said, lifting his glass.

“Sit down.”

“I’d better go. I thought we’d talk things out. You already said it all. You got feelings for your husband. The guy lost his daughter. I’m sorry for any harm I’ve caused y’all.”

“You sit down, Clete, and sit down now. Please don’t be hard on yourself. You still don’t understand.”

He sat down next to her, his knees turned toward her, his weight sinking deep into the cushions. “Understand what?”

She picked up his left hand in both of hers. “When you made love to me, I felt like I had gone off the planet. I haven’t felt like that in years. I felt like I was seventeen again. I felt like the world was brand-new.”

“I’m old, Felicity. I don’t delude myself. Once in a while a guy like me gets lucky. I know my limitations.”

“I want you. That’s what I’m trying to say. I feel sorry for Caspian, but I want you.”

“You can do better.”

“I want you, not somebody else. You appreciate a woman. You’re respectful. You’re loving. You think that’s lost on me? Take off your coat.”

“I don’t want to,” he said.

“You spilled your drink on it. If you get stopped, the police will think you’re drunk. I’ll clean it for you.”

He stood up and removed his seersucker coat and laid it on the coffee table. She looked at the shoulder rig he was wearing and at the snub-nosed blue-back .38 he carried in a nylon holster. “Why do you need that?” she asked.

“Because not to carry it is to say I believe in the world. I don’t believe in the world, at least not the one I’ve seen. I don’t like authority, either. Anyone who wants to control other people is out to fuck you over. So I carry my own authority.”

She took his coat into the kitchen and ran cold water over the rum-and-Coke stain, then blotted it with a paper towel and put it on a hanger. She went into the living room and stood in front of him, backlit by the electricity flickering outside. “Is my conduct embarrassing to you?” she said.

“What conduct?” he asked, looking up at her.

“This.”

He looked away, then back. “You’re beautiful.”

“You don’t think I’m an adventuress or a Judas?”

“A guy with my record can’t judge anybody.”

“You do like me, don’t you? I don’t look too old or heavy and wrinkled?”

“You’re not any of those things. You’re like New Orleans, Felicity. You’re an orchid in a garden that never saw sunshine.”

Her mouth parted. “No one ever said anything like that to me.”

“You’re every man’s dream. Give yourself some credit.”

She spread her knees and knelt on his thighs and held his head against her breasts and kissed his hair. “Oh, Clete,” she said. “Don’t go away from me. Not now, not ever.”

He didn’t know what to say or do. He closed his eyes and saw an image deep in his mind that made no sense. He saw his father’s milk truck driving away from him, the melted ice draining over the back bumper, swinging in a thick, dirty spray on the street.

On Monday afternoon I looked through the upstairs window and saw three cruisers pull up in front of the north pasture, and one deputy get out and unchain the vehicle gate. The three cruisers went inside the pasture, and the deputy chained the gate behind them. The vehicles drove through the grass and came to a stop thirty yards from Clete’s cabin.

Earlier in the day, Albert Hollister had dumped and scrubbed out and refilled the water tank by the barn. The horses were drinking out of it when Sheriff Elvis Bisbee and two uniformed deputies and a man in a suit stepped from the vehicles and fanned out and approached the cabin, each with the heel of his hand resting on the butt of his sidearm. The horses backed away from the tank, their skin twitching the way it does when they’re attacked by blowflies.

By the time I got downstairs and out the front door, I could see two deputies shaking down Gretchen against a cruiser, running their hands under her arms and inside her thighs. Clete was arguing with Bisbee, up close and personal, his face red, his hands barely held in check at his sides, like a ballplayer getting into the face of an umpire.

I went through the pedestrian gate, past the horses and the barn. “Hold on,” I said.

The sheriff turned around. So did the plainclothes. I realized he was the uniformed deputy who had ridiculed Gretchen.

“No, sir, Mr. Robicheaux,” the sheriff said.

“No, sir, what?” I replied.

“This time you back off.”

“What’s she charged with?” I asked.

“Put it in the plural,” he replied.

“You want me to tell him?” the plainclothes said.

“What’s your name?” I said.

“Detective Jack Boyd.”

“Sheriff, this is the same guy who called Miss Gretchen ‘butch’ up on the hillside,” I said.

“Then she can file a complaint,” he replied.

“I asked you what she’s charged with.”

“How about vandalizing a motel room?” said the sheriff. “How about kidnapping and assault and battery? How about conspiracy to commit kidnapping? Her partner in this is Wyatt Dixon. How do you like that?”

“Who’d they kidnap?” I said.

“A guy named Anthony Zappa,” the sheriff said. “Know the name? He worked for Love Younger.”

Behind him, the two uniformed deputies were hooking up Gretchen. Her shoulders looked wide and stiff against her shirt, her midriff showing.

“That’s ridiculous. She’s not a kidnapper or someone who vandalizes motels,” I said.

“She only kills them?”

“You’re talking about the guy on the river, the one who shot at her from a pickup truck? That was self-defense.”

“Yesterday evening Zappa was taped to a chair in a motel on West Broadway. He bailed through a window, probably because he was being tortured. In the meantime, the clerk chained up his Harley and dragged it down the street and left it burning in the middle of an intersection. When I asked if you knew Anthony Zappa’s name, I used the past tense.”