James Burke - Light of the World

“The who?”

“I knew you’d say that. Take off your boots.”

“Tell you what, I’ll let you shine them,” Kyle said. He lifted his cigarette to his mouth and took a puff. “While you’re down there, you can cop my stick.”

Clete stared at his reflection in Kyle’s sunglasses. The image was anatomically distorted, the head small, the body elephantine, the skin amber-tinted, like those of a miniaturized man trapped inside a beer bottle. “The sign out there says For Staff Only,” he said. “You want to pollute the place reserved for your fellow employees?” Clete pulled the cigarette from Kyle’s mouth and flipped it out on the grass. Then he dropped the flap on the front of the tent.

“Buddy, you just don’t learn,” Kyle said.

“Pull up your pants leg.”

“Enough with the boots. They’re boots . What the fuck is with you?”

“There’s no chance you and your buds tore the clothes off a woman up the Blackfoot and poured dirt in her mouth, is there? Right before two of you held her down and the third guy climbed on top of her?”

“You and your friend got a serious thinking disorder.” Kyle started out of the tent, but Clete stepped in his way.

“I want your boots.”

“If you haven’t noticed, there’s maybe five hundred people out there. A lot of them are my friends.”

“You’re right,” Clete said. “Forget everything I said, and let’s see if we can’t find another way.”

Clete cupped his left hand behind Kyle’s neck, almost as if consoling him, then drove his right fist into the man’s stomach, the blow sinking so deep that Kyle’s upper body jacked forward and his mouth formed into a cone, as though he wanted to speak but couldn’t, the blood draining from his cheeks.

Clete pushed him onto the ground, stepped on one of his ankles, and twisted the boot off his other foot. He looked at the label inside. “That’s what I call really low-rent. You steal the boots off a guy like Wyatt Dixon? He’s probably got hoof-and-mouth disease. Did you get his socks, too?”

He stuck the boot under his coat and walked out of the tent onto the fairway. Kyle stumbled after him, thrashing his way through the tent flap. He slipped on the grass and fell down again, gasping for air.

“The guy’s having a seizure!” Clete shouted, his face dilated with feigned alarm. “Get an ambulance!” He pushed his way through the crowd, not looking back.

“What happened?” I said.

“I’ve got one of his boots. It’s a Tony Lama,” he said.

“What did you do?” Alafair said.

“I think the guy fell down and got the wind knocked out of him. Don’t run. Everything is copacetic.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I take that back. Haul ass!”

Sunday morning Wyatt Dixon was lying shirtless and in his socks in a hammock strung between two cottonwoods, down by the water’s edge, in front of his house on the Blackfoot. When he heard somebody clanging across the steel swing bridge, he didn’t know if the sound was real or if a junkyard was rolling around in his head. He picked up his pint of mint-flavored sloe gin and took a sip and gargled with it, then swallowed. With one eye closed, he watched a slender man with a jet-black mustache and flared sideburns approach him. The man was carrying a paper sack.

“Do you know some people say a law dog has a smell that don’t wash off?” Wyatt said. “They say it’s like trying to launder the stink out of shit.”

“You’re a hard man to find, Dixon.”

“Not if you come to the place I happen to be at. You can call me Mr. Dixon.”

“Your neighbors say you’ve been drunk for the last couple of days.”

“I cain’t necessarily say one way or the other. I have these empty spaces in my memory, kind of like holes in rat cheese. My neighbors are still giving out news bulletins on me, huh?”

“You remember me?”

“Jack Something. I know it’s not Jack Shit. Wait a minute, it’s coming. You replaced Detective Pepper. The name is Jack Boyd. Or do you like Jack Shit better?”

The detective lifted his finger at the pint bottle balanced on Wyatt’s chest. “I always heard that stuff tasted like mouthwash with turpentine poured in it.”

“It does. That’s why I drink it.”

“I went by your girlfriend’s apartment. Bertha Phelps is still your girlfriend, right?”

“We’re in a holding pattern.”

The detective gazed at the river. It was wide and green and veined with froth from a beaver dam upstream. “You must have your women trained. I wish I knew the trick.”

“About what?”

“Training women. You use Viagra?”

Wyatt screwed the cap on his gin bottle and set it down in the grass. He looked at the detective with one eye. “I’m having a little trouble focusing on the direction of your conversation.”

“She accused the department of trying to put you back inside. From what she says, you’re an innocent man. In fact, you hung the moon. What’s your secret? That’s what I’m saying.”

“Secret about what?”

“Lighting up a woman’s inner self. You don’t ride them hard and put them away wet, I guess. I thought that was the cowboy way.”

Wyatt sat up in the hammock and rested his sock feet on the grass. “I don’t know as I care for the way you’re talking about Miss Bertha.”

The detective turned the paper bag upside down and let the contents slip loose and fall on the ground. “Ever see that before?”

“It’s a boot.”

“It’s a Tony Lama boot. You claimed the men who attacked you stole your Tony Lama boots. They were cordovan. So is this.”

“It ain’t mine.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s too small. I’ll show you.” Wyatt picked up the boot and felt for the label inside. “This one is a ten and a half. I wear a twelve.”

“Your feet don’t look like a twelve to me.”

Wyatt pointed to a pair of suede half-top boots in the grass. “Check them out.”

“You could be wearing those because you have an ACE bandage on your ankle.”

“I wear them because my feet are a size twelve. If that was my boot, I’d take it and ask you where the other one was at. But it ain’t mine.”

Wyatt’s face remained empty of expression. He looked at his nails, then up through the cottonwoods at the sky, seemingly uninterested in the origins of the boot. The detective handed him a photo lineup with six mug shots. “You ever see any of these men?”

Wyatt studied the photos. “I’ve seen this guy here in the middle.”

“Are you positive?”

“Absolutely.”

“Where?”

“At the fairgrounds or a powwow.”

“When?”

“Last summer. Up at the Indian rodeo on the rez.”

“That’s interesting, because he died in Deer Lodge ten years ago. I reread the report, Dixon. You said one of your attackers had long blond hair. He lost his mask, and his bandana came loose from his head. That’s when you saw his hair. You must have seen at least part of his face.”

“That was at the same time I got hit upside the head with a rock.”

The detective tapped his finger on the mug shot of a man whose eyes seemed mismatched, as though they had been transplanted from two separate faces. “Did you ever see this man?”

“No. Who is he?”

“Kyle Schumacher. He did three years in California for statutory rape.”

“Where’d you get the boot?”

“If it’s not yours, you don’t need to worry about it. On second thought, I guess it won’t hurt anything. A PI from New Orleans brought it in.”

Wyatt watched a wood duck bob down the middle of the riffle. “Y’all hear anything else about that waitress who disappeared up by Lookout Pass?”