James Burke - Light of the World

He pulled the small revolver from the Velcro-strapped holster and flipped out the cylinder and shook the five .22 rounds from the chambers into Boyd’s face. The revolver was rust-pitted, the bluing on the cylinder worn, the sight filed off, the wood grips wrapped with electrician’s tape that was inverted, sticky side out. Clete shoved the revolver into Boyd’s mouth and hammered it down with the heel of his hand.

“We’re done, Cletus. Back away,” I said.

“They were going to take both of us out, Streak. These guys need special handling. Yes, indeedy they do. You ever see a ville trashed with Zippo tracks, boys? You can’t believe what ran out of the hooches.”

At that moment I knew Clete had gone into a separate time zone, one where reason and morality held no sway and psychosis was the standard. He drenched both men with gasoline, spraying it in their faces and mouths and eyes. He fished his lighter out of his pocket. “Nobody does a number on the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide. You got that? Show me you understand, or you’re going to be a pair of human pinwheels.”

“Clete, don’t!” Felicity begged. “This isn’t you. No matter what they’ve done, you can’t do this.”

“Listen to her,” I said. “It’s over. Look at them. They’re pitiful. They’ll never forget this night as long as they live.”

I put my hand over the lighter and squeezed, splaying his fingers and thumb. He stared at me woodenly. I saw the glaze go out of his eyes, the heat leave his face, like the glow of a hot coal dying inside its own ashes.

“They knew I was kidding,” he said. “No big deal. Right? You boys copacetic down there? How about a soda?”

Through the window of the convenience store, I saw a clerk dialing the phone and talking into the receiver, his mouth moving rapidly.

“We’re in Ravalli County,” I said. “I don’t want to explain this to the locals.”

I started toward the pickup. I thought we were done. Then I heard Caspian get to his feet and stumble against the pumps, grabbing the trash barrel for support, gasoline and blood running down his face, his broken lips twisted into a grin. He started to speak, then had to spit and begin again. “Neither one of you has any idea what this is about, do you?” he said. “Know why that is? You’re the little people, but you’re too stupid to realize it. Ask Felicity what kind of guy my father is. She ought to know. He fucked her. Now they’re both going to fuck you, just like they both fucked me.”

He started laughing, sliding down the side of the pump like a scarecrow collapsing on its own sticks.

The sun hadn’t risen above the mountain when Gretchen woke the next morning. The inside of the cabin was cold, and when she washed her face, the water was like ice on her skin. Clete had just lit the woodstove, and she could see the fire through the slits in the stove’s grate, the condensation on the iron shrinking and disappearing into wisps of steam. She pulled aside the curtain on the kitchen window and looked at the fog on the pasture and the snow flurries blowing out of the darkness, as white and fluttering as moths trapped inside a closet.

She had not remembered the dream she was having when she woke, but as she looked at the outside world, she knew the man who had fingers with lights on the tips but no face had come to visit her again.

“Albert left a message on the door. An FBI agent wants you to call him,” Clete said. “Dave took the photo of the missing waitress to them.”

“I’m not sure it was Surrette who put it on my truck seat. I’m not sure the photo is of the waitress, either.”

“What are you trying to do, Gretchen? Get yourself killed or sent to prison? You want to go down for obstruction? Stop fooling yourself.”

“I want to cap Surrette.”

“You made a conscious choice to leave the life. Don’t let this guy change that.”

“I don’t know how many times I have to say this to you: I was never in the life.”

“What do you call it?”

“Getting even.”

“Are you going to talk to the FBI agent?”

“Would you ?” she replied. She raised her eyebrows in the silence, her hair hanging in her eyes. “That’s what I thought. I’m going to have breakfast in town.”

She drove down the dirt road to the two-lane and ate at McDonald’s in Lolo. Through the window, she could see the sunlight climbing up a huge sloping hillside covered with Douglas fir, as though the sunrise were involved in a contest of wills with the forces that ruled the night. She knew these were foolish thoughts, but she woke with them almost every day of her life. The man whose fingertips glowed with fire and who leaned down over her crib and touched her skin would always be with her. She wanted to tell Clete these things, but he had started talking about the federal agent and the photo of a girl taken in a basement, a girl wearing only her undergarments, a girl with a gag in her mouth, her ribs stenciled against her sides, her identity robbed by someone who had razored the eyes from the photo.

Gretchen knew that any number of psychiatrists would conclude she had conflated Asa Surrette with the man whose fingertips had burned her body from head to foot, or with the man named Bix Golightly who had sodomized her on her sixth birthday. What if I did? she heard herself ask the imaginary psychiatrists she often held conversations with. Abusers were all cut out of the same cloth. In her opinion, they all deserved the same fate. There was nothing complex about any of them. They were craven, and they delighted in the satisfaction of their own needs at the expense of others. Asa Surrette was the embodiment of every misogynist and predator she had known. How he had been allowed to kill people for twenty years in his hometown was beyond her. Was it wrong that she wanted to track him down and force him to the edge of the abyss that had been created for men of his ilk?

In her experience, the only men who understood the level of pain undergone by a female rape victim were men who had been molested or raped themselves. Most of them did not talk about it, and most of them lived lives of quiet desperation and took their feelings of guilt and shame to the grave. Did they deserve an avenger? What a stupid question, she thought. Was she it? No, she was simply a survivor. Her abusers had made her a victim, and in doing so, they had made her powerless. The day she stopped being a victim was the day her abusers began to learn the meaning of fear.

Her cell phone vibrated on the tabletop; the words BLOCKED CALL appeared on the screen. She drank a sip of orange juice to ensure that there would be no obstruction in her throat when she answered. She opened the phone and placed it to her ear. “This is Gretchen,” she said.

“Good morning, munchkin.”

“I’m not keen on assigning other people nicknames.”

“I won’t do that anymore. Promise.”

“Can I call you Asa?”

“Who?”

“If we’re going to work together, we have to be honest about who we are.”

“Did you give the photo to the FBI?”

Don’t get caught in a lie, a voice said. “ I didn’t,” she replied.

“But someone did?”

“I can’t control what other people do.”

“That’s a good answer, Gretchen. The more contact I have with you, the more I feel we belong together.”

She waited for him to continue, but he didn’t. “A biopic is a challenge, Asa. The story line has to be authentic. Simultaneously, it has to conform to the rules of drama. These are things you and I have to work out as a team.”

“You wouldn’t patronize me, would you? I studied creative writing and read Aristotle’s Poetics . Why do you keep calling me Asa?”