Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

“Have you been inside, Mr. Dixon?”

“Inside what?”

“A place where smart-asses have a way of ending up. I understand you’re a rodeo man.”

“What some call a rodeo clown. What we call bullfighters. At one time I shot mustangs for a dog-food company down on the border. I don’t do that no more.”

“Were you hunting about five miles up Highway 12?”

“No, sir, I was changing the tire on my truck.”

“You have any idea who might have shot an arrow at my daughter?”

“No, but I’m getting mighty tired of hearing about it.”

“Did you see anyone on that ridge besides my daughter?”

“No, I didn’t.” He put down his sandwich and removed his paper bib and wiped his mouth and fingers clean. He turned on the stool. All the color seemed to be leeched out of his eyes except for the pupils, which looked like the burnt tips of wood matches. “Watch this,” he said.

“Watch what?”

“This.” He sprinkled salt on the bar and balanced the shaker on its edge amid the granules so it leaned at an angle like the Tower of Pisa. “Bet neither one of y’all can do that.”

“Call 911,” I said to Alafair.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said.

“Go ahead.”

“Did somebody shoot you in the face?”

“Yeah, someone did. I was lucky. He was a bad guy, a degenerate and a sadist and a stone killer.”

“I bet you sent him straight to the injection table, didn’t you?” he said, his eyes bulging, his mouth dropping open in mock exaltation.

“No, it didn’t make the jail.”

His mouth opened even wider, as though he were unable to control his level of shock. “I am completely blown away. I have traveled this great nation from coast to coast and have stood in the arena among the great heroes of our time. I am awed and humbled to be in the presence of a lawman such as yourself. Even though I am only a simple rodeo cowboy, I stand and salute you, sir.”

He rose from the stool, puffing out his chest, his body rigid as though at attention, his stiffened right hand at the corner of his eyebrow. “God bless you, sir. Your kind makes me proud of the red, white, and blue, even though I am not worthy to stand in your shadow, in this lowly barroom on the backstreets of America, where men with broken hearts go and the scarlet waters flow. The likes of Colin Kelly and Audie Murphy didn’t have nothing on you, kind sir.”

People were staring at us, although he took no notice of them.

I said, “You called my daughter ‘girl’ and ‘sweet thing.’ You also made a veiled threat about seeing her down the track. Don’t ever come near us again, Mr. Dixon.”

His eyes wandered over my face. His mouth was down-hooked at the corners, his skin taut as pig hide, the dimple in his chin clean-shaven and shiny, perhaps with aftershave. He glanced through the front window at a sheriff’s cruiser pulling into the parking lot. The moral vacuity of his profile reminded me of a shark’s when it passes close to the glass in an aquarium.

“Did you hear me?” I said.

“That 911 deputy ain’t gonna find nothing in my truck, ’cause there ain’t nothing to find,” he said. “You asked if I was inside. I got my head lit up with amounts of electricity that make you glad for the rubber gag they put in your mouth. Before you get your nose too high in the air, Mr. Robicheaux, your daughter asked me if that ‘fucking arrow’ was mine. She talked to me like I was white trash.”

He sat back down and began eating his sandwich again, swallowing it in large pieces without chewing or drinking from his soda, his expression reconfiguring, like that of a man who could not decide who he was.

I should have walked away. Maybe he wasn’t totally to blame. Maybe Alafair had indeed spoken down to him. Regardless, he had tried to frighten her, and there are some things a father can’t let slide. I touched him on the shoulder, on the pattern of white stars sewn onto the fabric. “You’re not a victim, partner,” I said. “I’m going to pull your jacket and see what you’ve been up to. I hope you’ve been on the square with us, Mr. Dixon.”

He didn’t turn around, but I could see the rigidity in his back and the blood rising in his neck like the red fluid in a thermometer.

THE ALLURE OF Montana is like a commitment to a narcotic; you can never use it up or get enough of it. Its wilderness areas probably resemble the earth on the first day of creation. For me it was also a carousel, one whose song and light show never ended. The morning after Alafair’s confrontation with Wyatt Dixon, we had rain, then blowing snow inside the sunshine, then sleeting snow and rain, and sunshine again and green pastures and flowers blooming in the gardens and a rainbow that arched across the mountains. All of this before nine A.M.