Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

She looked away, her eyes full of injury.

“He did something to you?”

“I won’t lie about it.”

“He put his hand on you?”

“I said I wouldn’t lie about it, but that doesn’t mean we should fall into his trap,” she replied. “I hate the Youngers. I hate what they’ve done to you.”

“Tell me what he did, Bertha.”

“I was going out the door. He kicked me. He laughed when he did it, too.”

The coffee had started to boil. Wyatt removed the top from the pot and fitted his palm through the handle. He lifted the pot to his mouth and drank, his face as expressionless as a leather mask, his pupils like dead flies trapped in glass. “Where did he kick you?”

“In the behind.”

He looked into space and drank again from the pot, his lips gray from the heat. “He told you where the old man was at?”

“Don’t ask me questions you already know the answers to.”

“I just want to know where Love Younger is at.”

“So you can do exactly what Caspian Younger wants you to?”

He set the coffeepot back on the stove. There was a red stripe across his palm. “Hear it?” he said.

“Hear what?”

“A train. Up on the railroad bed.”

“Those tracks were torn up decades ago. There’s nothing there except the cliff and an empty rail bed.”

“I heard it a-blowing down the line, whistling through a canyon.”

“That’s the wind.”

“No, ma’am, it ain’t. I been hearing that whistle all my life. He’s at Sweathouse Creek, ain’t he?”

“How’d you know?”

“I followed him there once. Love Younger ain’t that smart. He sired the likes of me, ain’t he?”

He slipped on his boots and stuck his sheathed bowie knife in the back pocket of his Wranglers, then pulled on a long-sleeved snap-button shirt and walked through the clutter of his living room and out the front door.

“I’m coming,” she said. “You’re not going without me.”

He turned and looked at her. Her expression was disjointed, her anatomical construction seeming to disintegrate as she approached, like a digital figure collapsing into a pile of dots. He pushed at his temple with his thumb until his vision seemed to correct

itself.

“We’re in this together,” she said. She took hold of his right arm with both hands and clutched it tighter than anyone had ever held him in his life. “We’ll never be apart again. If I have to go with you to the grave, Wyatt Dixon, you hear what I’m saying to you? Don’t you ever try to leave me.”

LOVE YOUNGER STOOD behind his cabin on Sweathouse Creek and stared up at the canyon walls. There were boulders in the canyon the size of a two-story house, even bigger, all of them surrounded by towering trees that grew cheek by jowl against the stone. He could see bighorn sheep up on a ledge, one that was no more than two feet wide. They were working their way toward the summit of the mountain while tiny rocks rilled down from their hooves, over the lip of the trail, falling at least four hundred feet onto the canopy of cottonwoods that grew along the banks of the creek. A slip, a miscalculation, a weak spot in the stone that split under their weight, and they would plummet to their deaths. Yet they never hesitated or showed fear, as though knowledge of the topography had been wired into them. Love Younger wondered why humankind did not feel the same kind of security. The sun was west of the Bitterroots now, and the air in the canyon had turned cold, and the magenta coloration above the top of the canyon was fading to a dark shade of blue that made him think of a curtain being closed on a stage.

He had taken a black-powder revolver to shoot at targets he picked out randomly along the creek—a wet rock dancing with spray, a wild rose hanging on a green stem over the current, a cedar stump that had decayed into pulp the color of rust. He aimed at all three of these targets but could not bring himself to pull the trigger. There was a stillness inside the entrance of the canyon that felt almost holy. He raised his eyes to the ledge and realized the bighorn sheep had disappeared inside a low-hanging cloud, as though the mountain had provided sanctuary from either his gaze or his firearm. Was that his role in the world? The harbinger of destruction? The twentieth century’s representative of a petrochemical empire staining the ground with the greasy imprint of his shoes?

Maybe this was not a good time to be alone, he told himself. But what merit was there in a man’s life if he had to fear solitude? Love Younger had created jobs for hundreds of thousands of workers all over the globe. His pipelines and drilling platforms delivered the oil and natural gas on which the entirety of the industrial world depended. Did any rational person believe he wanted to pollute the earth and incur environmental lawsuits that could cost his companies billions of dollars? Love Younger was a fair man. No one could say he wasn’t. The enemy was poverty, not refineries. How many environmentalists had worn clothes sewn from Purina feed sacks when they were children?