Light of the World (35 page)

I didn’t answer.

“Of course not,” she said. “Because we don’t run away from problems. That’s what you always taught me. And we never allow ourselves to be afraid. You said it over and over when I was growing up.”

“I didn’t say close your eyes to reality.”

“Where’s Gretchen?” she said.

“At the cabin with Clete.”

“None of this is her fault. Don’t put it on her, Dave.”

“I haven’t,” I said.

“You were thinking about it.”

“She’s a lightning rod, Alf.”

“Let’s get something straight, Pops. I’m the one who stoked up Asa Surrette, not Gretchen.”

“It’s not all about you. He has other reasons for being here. I just don’t know what they are.”

She put her hand on the back of my neck and squeezed. “You worry too much. We’ll get through this. What is it Clete always says? Good guys
über alles
?” She took her hand away from my neck. “You’re hot as a stove. You have a fever?”

“Like you say, I worry too much,” I replied.

H
E HAD HIS
hair barbered by a stylist and his suit dry-cleaned and pressed and checked into a motel under the name of Reverend Geta Noonen, way up a long mountainous slope next to a river, almost to Idaho, in an area where people still lived up the drainages and off the computer. Inside his room, he threw away his pipe and tobacco and dyed and blow-dried his hair a sandy blond and, for twenty
minutes, used a brush and washrag in the shower to scrub the smell of nicotine off his skin and nails. He shaved his chest and armpits, pared and clipped his nails, and layered his body with deodorant.

When he was tempted to retrieve his pipe from the wastebasket and core it out and refill it with the dark mix of imported tobaccos he had loved for years, he put a piece of licorice in his mouth and sucked it into a tiny lump and did push-ups in front of the television and then ate another piece until the craving passed. He showered again and kept the cold water on his face and head and shoulders so long that he was numb all over and had no desire other than to get warm and to put hot food in his stomach.

Yes, he could do it, he told himself. The sacrifice of his only vice was small compared to the reward that awaited him west of Lolo, on the ranch owned by Albert Hollister. He took a print shirt from a box of eighteen he had bought at Costco and put it on with his beige suit and a pair of new loafers and looked into the mirror. Clean-shaven and blond, he hardly recognized himself. He looked like an aging sportsman, a sun-bleached fellow strolling along a beach in the Florida Keys, his mouth effeminate in an appealing way, the palm trees lifting against a lavender sky, a woman at an outside bar glancing up at him.

Not bad,
he thought.

He ate supper at the counter in the café attached to the motel. Through the back window, he could see the river flowing long and straight out of the hills, the rocks protruding from the riffle, the surface dark and glistening with the last rays of a red sun. A man in hip waders was fly-casting in the shallows, working the nylon line into a figure eight above his head and laying the fly onto the riffle as gently as a butterfly descending on a leaf. Except the man who had registered as the Reverend Geta Noonen was not interested in fly-fishing. He could see a swing set on the motel lawn, down by the water, and a little girl throwing rocks in the current while the mother watched. He put a forkful of meat loaf in his mouth, blowing air on it as he chewed, as though it were too hot to swallow.

“The food okay?” the waitress asked. She was young and uncertain, her bones as fragile as a bird’s. Her pink uniform was splattered
on one side with either grease or dishwater, and she kept looking away from the man’s face as she waited for him to answer.

“It’s perfect,” he said.

“I thought it might be too hot. I put it in the micro because you were in the washroom.”

“You have a nice place here.”

“It’s out of the way, but we like it,” she said, refilling his coffee cup, her face filling with pleasure because the customer had complimented the place where she worked.

“It’s a family-type diner. That’s the best kind. I bet it’s American-owned,” he said.

“Yes, sir, it is.”

He gazed out the window, his eyes sleepy and warm with sentiment. “Salt of the earth,” he said.

“Pardon?”

“I was talking about those people out there. Mother and child. That’s the salt of the earth.”

“You talk like a preacher.”

“That’s because I am.”

“Which church?”

“The big one, the one that doesn’t have a name.”

She seemed to think a moment. “Meaning Jesus doesn’t belong to just one denomination?”

“That pretty much says it all. Watch yourself.”

“Sir?”

“You’re about to spill that hot coffee on your foot.”

“I know better than that.”

“I bet you do. I bet you know plenty.”

“Beg your pardon?”

“About the restaurant business and public relations. About the people who come in here. You’re a good judge of people, I bet.”

“I can tell the good ones from the bad ones.”

“Which am I?”

“You’re a preacher, aren’t you? That speaks for itself, doesn’t it?”

“You better be careful. I might run off with you. If my daughter had grown up, I bet she’d be like you.”

“You lost your daughter?”

“It was a long time ago. You have a sweet face, just like she did.”

She blushed and was about to reply when another customer came through the front door and tapped on the counter for his order to go. “Excuse me,” she said. “I better get back to work.”

As she walked away, she did not see the change of expression in the face of the man who called himself the Reverend Geta Noonen. He set down his fork and looked at it with deliberation, then picked up his coffee and drank from it and stared at his reflection. By the time he set the cup back in the saucer, his expression was once again benign and ordinary, his attention focused on his meal, his eyes drifting back to the scene behind the motel, where the mother was pushing her daughter back and forth on the swing.

He put a two-dollar tip on the counter and waited until the waitress was in the vicinity of the cash register before he got up to pay his check.

“I forgot to ask if you wanted any pie,” she said. “We have peach cobbler that’s good. The cherry pie isn’t bad, either.”

“I never pass up cherry pie. What time do you close?”

“Ten. I usually don’t work this late. I’m filling in for somebody else. In the morning I have to come in early and open up. I don’t mind, though.”

“You belong to a church?”

“I go at Christmas and Easter.”

“I’ll wager they know you’re there, too.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I didn’t mean to be too personal a moment ago. But I need to tell you something. You have an aura. Certain people have it. I think you’re one of them.”

Her eyes filmed, and there was a visible lump in her throat when she looked back at him.

He walked out of the café into the night, the stars like a spray of white diamonds from one horizon to the other, the highway that led to Lookout Pass climbing higher and higher into the mountains, where the headlights of the great trucks driving into Idaho tunneled
up into the darkness, then dipped down on the far side of the grade and seemed to disappear into a bowl of ink.

Reverend Noonen walked onto the lawn where the mother had been swinging her little girl. The swing was empty, the chains clinking slightly in the breeze. The man glanced at his wristwatch and looked back at the lighted windows of the café, inside which the young waitress was wiping off the counter, bending over it, scrubbing the rag hard on the surface where some of his spilled food had dried. He worked a toothpick between his teeth while he watched her, then heard voices from the parking lot and realized the mother and her child were moving their suitcases from a battered van into a room at the back of the motel, in an unlighted area where no other guests seemed to be staying.

The woman was struggling with a suitcase while the little girl was climbing through the side door of the van, trying to pull out a sack of groceries that had already started to split apart, her rear end pointed out. The man removed the toothpick from his mouth and let it drop from his hand onto the grass, then walked into the parking lot. “My heavens, let me help you with that,” he said.

“Thank goodness,” the mother said. “I’ve had enough problems today without this. Our room is just over there. This is very kind of you.”

I
N THE MORNING
he rose with the sun and showered again and put on fresh clothes and ordered a big breakfast in the café. The owner was doing double duty, running the cash register and carrying plates from the serving window to the counter and the tables.

“Where’s the little lady who was working here last night?” said the man who called himself Reverend Geta Noonen.

“That’s Rhonda.”

“Where might she be?”

“She didn’t show up this morning.”

“She has a glow about her. Sorry, what was that you said?”

“She didn’t come in. It’s not like her.” The owner looked out the window at the highway, where the sun was shining on a rock slide.
The rocks were jagged and sharp-edged, and some had bounced out on the shoulder of the asphalt. The owner frowned as he looked at the broken rock on the roadside.

“Maybe she’s sick,” said the man sitting at the counter.

“She didn’t answer her phone,” the owner said.

“Does she have folks here’bouts?”

“Not really. She lives way up a dirt road by Lookout Pass. I’ve always told her she should move into town.”

“I bet she had car trouble. Her cell phone wouldn’t work out here, would it?”

“I called the sheriff. He’s sending a cruiser. You want more coffee?” the owner said.

“Maybe a piece of that cherry pie to go. I guess every man should be allowed one vice.”

“What’s that you say?”

“I’ve got an addiction to desserts. I can’t get enough. Especially cherry pie.”

“I know what you mean.”

“I doubt it.”

“Come again?” the owner said.

“Nobody likes pie and cobbler and chocolate cake and jelly roll doughnuts as much as me. I don’t gain weight, but I can sure put it down. I hope the lady is all right. She seemed like a sweet thing.”

The owner turned around and looked at the shelf where he kept his pastries. “Sorry, the cherry pie is all gone.”

“I’ll have some the next time I’m by. I like it here. You’ve got a nice class of people.”

The owner began picking up the dirty dishes from the counter and didn’t look up again until the man had left. He dialed the number of his missing employee and let the phone ring for two minutes before he hung up. Because he didn’t know what else to do, he went outside into the harshness of the sunlight and looked up and down the highway, waiting for her car or a sheriff’s cruiser to appear. Then he crossed the four-lane and began kicking the fallen rock off the edge of the road back onto the shoulder.

Geta Noonen loaded his suitcase into the used SUV he had just
purchased and drove slowly out onto the highway, the gravel that was impacted in his tire treads clicking as loudly as studs on the asphalt. He passed the owner and tapped on the horn and stuck his arm out the window to wave good-bye. The owner waved back and continued to clean the broken rock out of the traffic lane, lest someone run over it and have an accident.

T
HE MORNING WAS
bright and cool when Geta Noonen drove into Missoula and went into a hardware and farm-supply store and came out with four hundred dollars in boxed and bagged purchases. After he had covered them with a tarp in the backseat of the SUV, he drove downtown and found a parking spot under the Higgins Street Bridge, one hour in advance of the Out to Lunch concert held weekly in the park by the Clark Fork. He slipped on a pair of aviator glasses and bought an ice cream cone from a vendor and strolled along the river walkway, pausing on an observation deck that allowed him an unobstructed view of the children riding the hand-carved wooden horses on the carousel and the kayakers practicing their maneuvers in the rapids by the bank.

As the sun rose into the center of the sky, he took up a position by a concrete abutment in the shade of the bridge and watched the cars filling the lot. When he sighted a rusted compact with two teenage girls in it, he folded his arms over his chest and gazed at the riverbank and the crowd filing under the bridge to the concert. The two girls locked their vehicle and walked through the man’s line of vision without noticing that he was watching their every move.

He strolled close to their car, then placed his hands on his hips and looked up at the sky and the mountains that ringed the city, like a tourist on his first day inside the state. He stooped over as though picking up a coin from the asphalt and sliced the air valve off one tire, then another. After the tires collapsed on the rims, he inserted the knife blade into the soft folds of rubber and sawed through the cord so they could not be repaired. He folded the knife in his palm and dropped it in his pants pocket and watched the concert from the back of the crowd, his eyes fastened on the two teenage girls.

At 1:05
P.M.
the girls returned to their rusted compact and stared in shock at the slashed tires.

“I saw a couple of bad-looking kids hanging around your car,” the man said. “When I walked over, they took off. I got here too late, I guess.”

The girls were obviously sisters, perhaps two years apart, with blue eyes and blond hair that was almost gold. The older girl had lost her baby fat and was at least three inches taller than her sister. “Why would anyone do this to us?” she said.

“Guess it’s the way a lot of kids are being raised up today,” the man said. “I’d offer to change your tire, but you’ve got two flats and probably only one spare. Is there somebody you can call?”

“Nobody’s home,” the younger girl said.

“Where are your folks?”

“Our mother works at the Goodwill,” the older girl said. “Our father drives part-time for a trucking company. He’s in Spokane today. He’ll be home tonight. He’s a minister. We have assembly at our house on Wednesday nights.”