Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

“Hi, Seymour!” everyone said.

He carried his wallet on a chain and wore a long-sleeved flannel shirt, even though the evening was warm. He wore jeans stitched with guitars on the back pockets and cowboy boots that looked made of plastic. There was an oily shine on his forehead, and his voice sounded like a guitar string wound on a wood peg to the point of breaking.

“The subject I got tonight is people who try to take a dump inside your head, and after a while you don’t know if it’s them who’s the problem or you,” he said. “What I’m saying is

there was this guy who came into the place where I work, and he had this stink on him like dog shit, and when I said something about it, he told me I had shot off my mouth to the wrong guy and he was gonna teach me a lesson.

“He told me to look into his face. No, he said look into his eyes. He really made me afraid. My sponsor says I haven’t owned up on the Fifth Step and I got a lot of buried guilt that bounces off other people and comes back on me. It makes me want to drink and use. I thought about going out and copping tonight, but I came to a meeting instead. Maybe all this is just my imagination working, right?”

Everyone thought he was finished and had started into a collective “Thanks, Seymour” when he waved his hands at the air and began talking again. “See, he made me go down to a pharmacy and pick up his prescriptions for him and shop for women’s stuff, a guy I never saw before, I mean a guy who took pleasure in telling me what a pitiful loser I was. Maybe that’s what I am. I don’t know, man, but I feel like walking out on the fucking railway track. Know what he said when he was going out the door? ‘Hey, tell your friends you met the Tin Man.’ Who’s the fucking Tin Man?”

Others tried to help him by telling their stories, but it was obvious that Seymour had packed his bag and moved into a dark space inside his head that no one else could enter. After the meeting ended, I put my hand on his shoulder. “My name is Dave Robicheaux,” I said. “You got a minute?”

“You a cop?”

“What makes you think that?” I said, smiling.

“I’ve seen you at another meeting. You wear a sport coat and keep your hands at your sides. Cops never let you know what they’re thinking. I’m right, huh?”

“Yeah, how about we go outside?” I said.

“I’m not feeling too good right now. Maybe I should head home.”

“The guy in your store is from Kansas. He’s a bad dude. And we need to talk.”

He looked out the window at the sun descending beyond the mountains in the west. “Mind if I smoke?”

“No,” I lied.

We sat on the steps of the church in the twilight. The streetlamps had come on, and the maple trees along the sidewalks contained a green luminescence that reminded me of the subdued yet brilliant colors you see in a van Gogh painting. He pulled a cigarette out of the pack in his shirt pocket and stuck it in his mouth and struck a paper match and tried to cup it in his palms, but he was shaking so badly, he dropped the match on the concrete. “I feel like I’m jonesing,” he said.

“I think you’re a stand-up guy, Seymour. It takes guts to talk about your problems in a roomful of people, many of them strangers. Did this guy in your store have a name besides Tin Man?”

“No, just a stink. It’s like he left shit prints all over the place. I had to wipe down everything he touched with Lysol.”

I didn’t want to see him get wired up again, so I changed the subject. “You’re not too warm in that shirt?”

“I was trying to hide my tats.”

“You were in the system?”

“No. The guy called me a fraud. I think he’s probably right. I didn’t earn my ink. I wanted people to think I was a badass. I even got the meeting off track tonight. We’re supposed to talk about using and drinking, not about problems with old geeks who read porn magazines. I feel awful.”

“He wants to infect others with his sickness, partner. Don’t let him get inside your head. You’re a good guy. You keep remembering that.”

“When I looked into his eyes, it really scared me, man. It was like looking into a cave that didn’t have a bottom.”

“Did he give you any indication where he might be living?”

“No. He had two girls with him. He was driving a gray SUV.”

“Do you remember the tag?”

“I wrote it down, then erased it.”

“Do you remember any part of it?”

“No. It was a Montana plate. That’s all I know. He said he was the godfather of the two girls. You’ve had some kind of run-in with him?”