Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

Had he just said that?

“Why should you trust me?”

“Because we both grew up in the same part of New Orleans. Because everybody from Uptown knows what everybody else there is thinking. It’s probably like an A.A. meeting. There’s only one story in the room. We all come out of the same culture.”

The fear she had described seemed to have lifted momentarily from her soul. There was a warm light in her eyes. Her hair had the tone and variations of color you see in old hand-rubbed mahogany. “When you talk, you make me feel good,” she said.

“I’m an overweight former homicide roach, Miss Felicity. I’m still persona non grata at NOPD. That’s like being a top sergeant in the Crotch, then getting your stripes pulled. Dave Robicheaux sobered up and got his life back. I never could pull it off. Three days without a drink, and my head turns into a concrete mixer.” He could see her attention fading, the fear and concern creeping back into her face. “I got a bad habit,” he said. “I start talking about myself and put everybody to sleep.”

She touched the top of his hand. “No, you’re a nice man. I mentioned something about Caspian that you wouldn’t have a way of understanding. He asked Love if he believed in hell. Caspian has never had any interest in religion. Why would he ask Love a question like that?”

Clete shook his head. “Guilt?”

“If Caspian ever felt guilt about anything, I never saw it. He’s the most selfish human being I’ve ever known.”

The kitchen window was open, and the curtains were blowing in the breeze. They were printed with small pink roses and made Clete think of the flower bed that his mother kept behind their small house in the old Irish Channel. “I think I’d better go,” he said. “I have a way of getting into trouble, Felicity. Lots of it. The kind that doesn’t go away and leaves people messed up for a long time.” The disappointment in her face was not feigned. He was sure of that, or at least as sure as he ever was when it came to matters of the heart. He got up to leave.

“Do what you need to do,” she said.

He nodded and walked to the door and tried to turn the key in the lock.

“Here, I’ll get it,” she said. She twisted the key and opened the door, her shoulder brushing against his arm. She turned her face up to his. He could feel his manhood flare inside him. Her mouth was like a rose, her hair blow-dried and so thick and lovely that he wanted to tangle his fingers in it. “Clete?” she said.

“Yeah?”

“You like me, don’t you?”

“Do I? I’ve got a fire truck driving around inside my head.”

“My daughter and my father are dead. I don’t have anyone.”

She let her arms hang at her sides and leaned her forehead directly into his chest, as though in total surrender to him and the level of failure that characterized her life.

One hour later, as he lay beside her, all his good intentions gone and his sexual energies exhausted, he thought about a story he had read as a boy in the old city library on St. Charles. The story was about Charlemagne and Roland on their way to Roncevaux. He wondered if they and their knights ever gave heed to the horns echoing off the canyon walls that surrounded them, or if they galloped onward through the cool blueness of the morning, beside a tea-colored stream, inside the rhythmic sweep of the wind in the trees, never realizing that the littered field began with a romantic quest, one that was as inviting and lovely and addictive as the grace to be found inside a woman’s thighs.

I HAVE NEVER LAID strong claim on rationality, in fact have often felt that its value is overrated. Let’s face it, life is easier if we maintain a semblance of reasonable behavior and hide some of our eccentricities and not say more than is necessary in our dealings with others. The same applies to our actions. Why attract attention? No one takes an accordion band to a deer hunt.

Like most people, I wonder why I don’t take my own advice.

The cave behind Albert’s house began to bother me. Had it provided shelter to Asa Surrette? Was the perversion of Scripture on the wall of no consequence? Was it not a hijacking of a Judeo-Christian culture on which most of our ethos is based, in this instance a hijacking by a subhuman abomination who should have been hosed off the bowl thirty seconds after his birth?

I found two empty wine bottles in Albert’s trash and filled them with gasoline I kept in a five-gallon can inside a steel lockbox welded to the bed of my pickup truck. I corked both bottles and carried them and the gas can up the hillside to the old logging road that traversed the mountain above Albert’s house. A doe with two fawns bounced through the trees ahead of me, flicking their tails straight up, the white underside exposed.

The area around the cave entrance had remained undisturbed. Inside the overhang, I could see the message. I began heaping deadwood and leaves and pine needles and big chunks of a worm-eaten stump that was as soft and dry as rotted cork, shoving it against the wall that contained the pirated lines.

I poured gasoline on the pile and set the can twenty feet from the cave opening, then lit a paper match and threw it inside the cave. The flame spread quickly over the fuel, climbing up the wall and flattening on the roof. Then I picked up the first wine bottle and flung it end over end into the fire. It broke against a fallen boulder and showered against the wall. Flames leaped from the cave, curling over the rim, scorching the overhang and singeing the grass and mushrooms that grew on top of it. I stepped back and tossed the second bottle inside. It landed on the deadwood and, seconds later, exploded from the heat rather than the impact. The fire was soon out of control, twisting in circular fashion, the flames feeding on themselves, spreading deeper into the cave, where there was probably a chimneylike opening drawing cold oxygen into the mixture of organic fuel and gasoline.

I could feel the heat on my face and arms and smell a stench that was like the odor of pack rat nests burning. I heard a sound behind me and looked over my shoulder and saw Albert laboring up the hill, sweating, his flannel shirt open on his chest, a fire extinguisher swinging from his hand. “What in the Sam Hill are you doing?” he said, out of breath.

“I thought I’d clean up the cave.”

“Why didn’t you napalm the whole mountain while you were at it?” He pulled the pin on the extinguisher’s release lever and sprayed the rim of the cave, then the inside. Huge clouds of white smoke billowed from the opening and floated through the treetops. “You know how to do it, Dave. What’s got into you?”

“I believe a genuinely evil man was up here, Albert. I believe he has no right to take language out of Scripture and deface the earth with it.”

“Sit down a minute.”

“What for?”