James Burke - Light of the World

“You’re married, Ms. Louviere. That fact won’t go away. My father wakes up every morning with his head in a vise.”

“I’m sorry.”

Gretchen tapped the speed bag with the flat of her fist and watched it swing back and forth on the swivel. “I’d better get back to my workout.”

“What are you listening to?”

“ The Big Sky, by A. B. Guthrie.”

“That’s a grand book.”

Gretchen tapped again on the bag, hitting it in a slow rhythm on the second rebound. “Did you see Shane ?”

“With Alan Ladd and Jean Arthur and Van Heflin.”

“Guthrie wrote the screenplay. It’s supposed to be the best western ever made. Except it’s not a western, it’s a Judeo-Greek tragedy. Shane doesn’t have a last or first name. He’s just Shane. He comes out of nowhere and never explains his origins. In the last scene, he disappears into a chain of mountains you can hardly see. Brandon deWilde played the little boy who runs after him and keeps shouting Shane’s name because he knows the Messiah has gone away. Nobody ever forgets that scene. I wake up thinking about it in the middle of the night.”

“Where did you learn all this?”

“At the movie theater. You know why the cattle barons in the film hate Shane? It’s because he doesn’t want or need what they have.”

Felicity’s eyes went away from Gretchen’s. “Are you trying to tell me something?”

“No, not at all. How did you know Jean Arthur and Van Heflin costarred with Alan Ladd?”

“I was a ticket taker at an art theater.”

“I’m doing my second documentary. My first one made Sundance. I think I might get enough financing from France to do a period film, an adaptation of a novel about Shiloh.”

“Why go to France for financing?”

“American producers are afraid to risk their money on historical pieces. Did you see Cold Mountain ? It was one of the best films ever made about the Civil War, but it bombed. The rest of the world is fascinated with American history. We’re not.” Gretchen tapped the bag. “I’ve got to get back to my workout.”

“You’re an interesting woman, Ms. Horowitz.”

“Who played the role of Jack Wilson, the hired gun?” Gretchen asked.

“Jack Palance,” Felicity said.

“How about Stonewall Torrey, the guy he kills?”

“Elisha Cook, Jr.”

“Did you know that in the scene when Stonewall gets shot, he was harnessed to a cable and jerked backward by an automobile?”

“No, I didn’t know that. I suspect most people don’t.”

“Let go of my old man, Ms. Louviere. He’s a good guy. His problem is, he’s not as tough as he thinks, and he gets hurt real easy.”

“Ask him what he wants to do and then tell me,” Felicity said. “That way, all three of us will know.”

Five minutes later, Gretchen glanced through the window at the health club’s parking lot. The crippled man named Tim had been working his chair down the sloped concrete walkway to the spot where he was picked up each day by a specially equipped vehicle. His hand had slipped on the wheel of his chair, and the chair had spun out of control on the incline and tipped sideways, throwing him on the concrete. No one else was in the parking lot. Felicity Louviere stopped her Audi and left it with the engine running and the driver’s door open while she tried to lift Tim by herself and get him back in the chair. When he fell again, she cradled his head in her lap, both of her knees bleeding, while she waved frantically at the entrance to the building.

Gretchen was no longer thinking about Felicity Louviere. She had figured out a way to put Asa Surrette in a vise. She drove downtown and placed notices in the personal columns of the city newspaper and two independent publications.

I woke at five Wednesday morning. A heavy fog had settled in the trees and on the north and south pastures, and I could hear Albert’s horses blowing inside it. I fell back asleep and dreamed I was in our home on Bayou Teche in New Iberia. It was late fall, and I could see the fog puffing in thick clouds out of the cypress and live oaks and pecan trees and flooded bamboo and elephant ears that grew along the banks. Then I saw myself walking in the mist to the drawbridge at Burke Street and gazing at the long band of amber light that ran down the center of the bayou, all the way to the next drawbridge, the live oaks forming a tunnel that made me think somehow of a birth canal. However, there was nothing celebratory about my perception. The back lawns of the houses along the bayou were blooming with chrysanthemums, not with the flowers of spring, and I could smell gas on the wind and the odor of ponded water and pecan husks and leaves that had yellowed and turned black with mold.

The scene changed, and I saw an image that woke me as though someone had struck me on the cheek. I sat on the side of the mattress, my hands on my knees, my throat dry. I had seen myself enter an old tin boat shed on Bayou Teche, its outside purple with rust, strung with wisps of Spanish moss that had blown off the trees. The wind was rattling the roof and walls of the shed, stressing the metal against the joists. When I stepped inside, the door slammed behind me, and I was surrounded by darkness, left to feel blindly along the walls, the coldness of the water rising into my face. There was no exit anywhere.

Molly put her hand on my back. “Did you have a bad dream?”

“It’s nothing. I’m all right.”

“You called out your mother’s name.”

“I did? She wasn’t in the dream.”

“You said, ‘Alafair Mae Guillory.’ ”

“That was her maiden name. She’d use it when she got mad at my father. She’d say, ‘I’m Alafair Mae Guillory, me.’ ”

“I wish I had known her. She must have been a fine woman.”

“An evil man corrupted her. The things that happened to her later weren’t her fault.”

I went into the bathroom and got dressed. I didn’t want to talk anymore about the dream. I knew what it meant, and I knew why and in what circumstances men cried out for their mothers. “Let’s have breakfast and take Clete fishing,” I said.

“Now?” she said.

“Is there any better time?” I replied.

IT WAS NOT a sentimental act. At a certain age, you realize the greatest loss you can experience is a theft you perpetrate upon yourself — the waste of days given us. Is there any more piercing remorse than the realization that a person has thrown away the potential that resides in every sunrise?

Alafair chose to stay at the house and work on her novel, and Clete and Molly and I drove in my truck to a spot on the Blackfoot River not far from Colonel Lindbergh’s old ranch. It is difficult to describe what the Blackfoot is like, because many of its natural qualities seem to have theological overtones. Maybe that’s why the Indians considered it a holy place. After the spring runoff, the water is blue-green and swift and cold and running in long riffles through boulders that stay half-submerged year round. The canyons are steep-sided and topped with fir and ponderosa and larch trees that turn gold in the fall. If you listen carefully, you notice the rocks under the stream knocking against one another and making a murmuring sound, as though talking to themselves or us.

The boulders along the banks are huge and often baked white and sometimes printed with the scales of hellgrammites. Many of the boulders are flat-topped and are wonderful to walk out on so you can fly-cast and create a wide-looping figure eight over your head and not hang your fly in the trees. Wild roses grow along the banks, as well as bushes and leafy vines that turn orange and scarlet and apricot and plum in the autumn. When the wind comes up the canyon, leaves and pine needles balloon into the air, as though the entirety of the environment is in reality a single organism that creates its own rebirth and obeys its own rules and takes no heed of man’s presence.