Light of the World (52 page)

Clete removed the nozzle from the tank and began to screw the gas cap back on the funnel, his expression flat, his eyes neutral. One of the fluorescent tubes above the gas island had shorted and started buzzing, like a wasp trapped inside a crawl space. Caspian leaned forward, within six inches of Clete’s ear, and spat on him.

Clete finished screwing the cap back on the gas tank, his green eyes as dispassionate as marbles. He pulled two paper towels from a dispenser and wiped the spittle from his cheek and ear and hair and dropped the towels into a trash barrel. Felicity opened the passenger door on the Caddy and stepped outside. “Can’t you leave us alone, Caspian?” she said. “You’ve gotten everything you wanted. Why do you want to go on hurting people?”

Caspian grinned at Clete. “Did you go downtown with her?” he said. “I have a feeling that’s one reason she’s kept you around. The bigger they are, the easier they are to control.”

“You guys win,” Clete said.

“Win what?” Caspian asked.

“You guys have got your way. Y’all are a whole lot smarter than me. What can I do?”

“Sorry, I don’t understand Sanskrit,” Caspian said.

“Really?” Clete said. “See how this translates.” He kicked Jack Boyd so hard in the groin that his face turned beet-red, then eggplant, as he went down on his knees, both hands clenched to his privates, his mouth locking open with pain that was so intense, no sound came out of his throat.

The roundhouse that caught Caspian lifted him into the air and sent him crashing into the side of the Caddy. Clete turned his attention back to Jack Boyd and kicked him in the face and stomped his head with the sole of his loafer, breaking his lips and nose and teeth. When Caspian tried to get up, Clete grabbed him by the back of the shirt and drove his face down on the Caddy’s fin, then whipped his head into a gas pump again and again, finally flinging him to the concrete.

He wasn’t finished. He ripped a small automatic from Boyd’s
clip-on holster and released the magazine and threw it into the darkness, then ejected the round in the chamber and threw the gun on the roof of the convenience store. “Where’s your drop, asshole?” he said.

Boyd was trying to sit erect, coughing teeth and blood on his shirt.

“Clete, stop it! Please!” Felicity said. “Please don’t hit them anymore!”

“See this?” Clete said to Felicity, jerking up Boyd’s trouser leg. “It’s called a throw-down. He was going to pop me. Maybe you, too.”

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.

T
HE 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?”

“Because you’re a famous man. Anonymity is the pretense of the weak.”

“Oh, I like that.”

“We have to meet. It’s imperative.”

Again he went silent.

“Are you there?” she said.

“Go to her house.”

“Whose?”

“You know whose. Up by Lookout Pass. There’s a flowerpot on the back porch. You’ll find something interesting under the pot. I put it there at daybreak, just for you.”

“You shouldn’t jerk me around.”

“I’m smarter than that. I’ve done a lifetime study of people. I know their secret fears and their desire for forbidden fruit. I see the weaknesses they try to hide from others. You’re different. You’re strong in the same way I am.”

“Thank you,” she said.

“What is your opinion of the cowboy?”

“Which cowboy?”

“The one who might be a player in our film.”

“Are you talking about Wyatt Dixon?”

“Is that his name? Have a nice drive up to Lookout Pass.”

“No, what are you telling me about Dixon?”

“Nothing. Someone doesn’t like him, that’s all. I thought we might cast him. There’s a tautness about him that I’d like to investigate. They all break, you know. It’s like a dam bursting. I can’t tell you how pleasurable that moment can be.”

She wadded up a napkin and pressed it to her mouth, her stomach roiling. “I want to ask a favor of you,” she said.

“Anything.”

“Don’t hurt the waitress.”

“You’re a tease,” he said. The connection went dead.

G
RETCHEN DROVE UP
the long grade that led to Lookout Pass and the high mountains that often disappeared into the clouds on the Idaho border. During the night, a storm had come down from Canada and left the sky dark at sunrise and the tops of the trees stiff with snow that had frozen on the branches. She turned off the highway, snow
flurries spinning off the hillsides into her windshield, and followed a dirt road to the small frame house where Rhonda Fayhee had lived.

The house was isolated, a cracker box in the midst of a windswept landscape that didn’t seem intended for human habitation. She parked in back and stood in the yard and gazed at the rock slides that bled down the sides of the mountains, the thin stands of pine that could barely find root, the sharpness of the peaks and crags, as though they had never been affected by the erosive forces of wind and water. Higher up, on an old logging road, someone had gouged a gravel pit into the side of the mountain, leaving an environmental wound that, in these surroundings, seemed natural.

She knew Surrette could be anywhere, watching her with binoculars or framing her inside the crosshairs of a telescopic sight. The storm clouds rolling across the mountaintops were bluish-black and forked with electricity, and she heard thunder boom in a distant canyon. She realized her skin was prickling, even though the cold usually did not bother her, and she got her canvas coat off the truck seat and tied a bandana on her head.

Like most people with meager incomes who live up the drainages in the high country, Rhonda Fayhee had winterized her house by nailing sheets of clear plastic over the windows. Now the plastic, along with the yellow crime scene tape, was broken and flapping in the wind. On the back step was a large ceramic pot with half a dirt ring next to the drain dish. Gretchen set the pot and the dish on the grass and picked up a conventional envelope with a sheet of folded paper inside. On it was a map drawn with a felt-tip pen that showed the house, the dirt road, a mountain two miles away, and a place designated as “old mine.”