Light of the World (Dave Robicheaux 20)

I compared them to the moral cowards who sat in the dock at Nuremberg. I told her that Jack the Ripper’s name was used today with an almost comic-book connotation because his victims were the poorest and most desperate and vulnerable of women in London’s East End. I told her I doubted Jack would have been given the sobriquet “Ripper” by the newspapers of his time if the victims were the wealthy female members of Victorian society. I told her of his final victim, an Irish prostitute who slept every night in either the workhouse or an alley. Her name was Mary Jane Kelly. The last words she spoke to a friend on the evening she died were “How do you like me jolly hat?”

“If you go inside the mind of a guy like Surrette, you’ll never be the same,” I told her.

“I can’t handle it, but reporters from the Wichita Eagle can?”

“People ‘handle’ cancer. That doesn’t mean it’s pleasant to live with.”

“I’ve already made the arrangement. I’m driving to Wichita tomorrow.”

“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly what you’re going to do. You will not be happy until you do just that.”

“You worry too much. I’ll be fine.”

“Alf—”

“Stop calling me that name.”

“Be careful.”

“He’s just a man. He’s not Lucifer. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not your little girl anymore.”

“Don’t ever say that again. Never.”

WYATT DIXON SAW no great puzzle at work in the universe. You got yourself squeezed out of a woman’s womb; you got the hell away from home as soon as you could; and you enjoyed every pleasure the earth had to offer and busted up any man who claimed he had authority over you. You rodeoed and got bull-hooked and stove in and stirrup-drug and flung into the boards and whipped like a rag doll when you tied yourself down with a suicide wrap, but you wore your scars like the Medal of Honor, and you took the women you wanted and drank whiskey like soda water and doffed your hat to no man and in effect said to hell with the rest of the human race.

Then one day, way down the line, on a morning you thought might last forever, you heard a whistle blow unexpectedly, and minutes later, against all your wishes, you climbed aboard a passing freight and sat on the spine and rode through a canyon alongside a river that had no name, wondering what lay in store on the far side of the Divide. Was it the end of the track? Or was the party just getting started?

He didn’t study on his childhood. He wasn’t sure he’d had one. He knew he was born in a boxcar not far from the birthplace of Clyde Barrow. He also knew he and his family lived in a tenant shack up in Northeast Texas and picked cotton and broke corn close to the birthplace of Audie Murphy. Sometimes he had dreams about his father and would see him sitting by the window, dressed in strap overalls without a shirt, his dugs like those of a woman, drinking from a fruit jar and staring at a railroad track on which a train never passed. For the young boy, the father’s silence could be like a scream. Wyatt would wake from the dream and sit for a long time on the side of the bed, waiting for the light to break in the east and burn all the shadows from the room.

He had learned long ago not to walk too far through the corridors of his soul. Whenever he allowed himself a moment of reverie, the scene was specific and controlled and always the same: He was in the bucking chute at a fairgrounds, his thighs clamped down on the horse’s sides, the

haze and dust from the arena iridescent in the lights blazing overhead, a Ferris wheel rotating against a salmon-colored sky, the audience in the stands waiting breathlessly for the moment when Wyatt would say, “Outside!”

Then he would be borne aloft by a horse named Bad Medicine, a piece of corkscrewing, sunfishing black lightning so wired and mean that some riders said he was one step short of a predator. In the first three seconds, Wyatt thought his buttocks would be split up the middle. A violent pain arced through his rectum into his genitals, his teeth jarred, and the discs in his spine fused into a bent iron chain that set his sciatic nerve aflame. He leaned so far back with each thud and jolt of the twelve hundred pounds between his legs that the rim of his hat touched Bad Medicine’s rump. All the while Wyatt kept one hand pointed high in the air, raising his knees, slashing down his spurs, the rowels spinning and glittering like serrated dimes, his red-fringed butterfly chaps flapping, his silver-plated championship buckle biting into his navel, his scrotum tingling with the thrill of victory, the buzzer as loud in his head as a foghorn, the crowd going crazy.

He had a house and nine acres up on the Blackfoot, all of it sandwiched between the riverbank and an abandoned railway grade up on the mountain. Half of the wood house had been crushed by a winter flood and ice jam and was never repaired, but Wyatt lived comfortably in the remaining half, cooking his food either on a Dutch oven in the yard or on a woodstove inside, and fishing with worms for German browns and rainbow trout at sunset. The access to the house was by an old log road no one else used, or by a pedestrian swing bridge that was not for the faint of heart.

Wyatt liked his life. What he did not like was people messing with it. He provided rough stock at rodeos from Calgary to Cheyenne, and sometimes he still put on greasepaint and football cleats and fought the bulls for riders who had been thrown into the dirt. He paid his bills, gave witness at revivals on the rez, and filed a 1040 each year. He called it “taking care of my side of the street.”

Just that afternoon, his neighbors across the river were having a party on the lawn, the stereo blaring rap music that was the equivalent of broken glass in his ears. Wyatt’s solution? He waded barefoot into the stream, the cold numbing his feet, rocks cutting the soles. He cupped his hands to his mouth and shouted, “Shut up that goddamn racket before I have to come over there!”

Stereo off. People leave the yard and disappear into the house. All quiet on the Blackfoot. End of problem.

Then he got into his pickup and drove up the dirt road to the two-lane and headed for a bar called the Wigwam, on the edge of the Salish Indian reservation.

It was sunset when he arrived, and the air was cold and sweet with the smell of the Jocko River and the wheel lines blowing water in a fine mist across the fields, electricity leaping inside a bank of thunderheads in the north. Rows of motorcycles were parked in front of the bar, and booted guys in leather vests and chaps, with road tans and jailhouse tats and a lot of body hair, were outside smoking and chugging beer, enjoying the breeze and the view of the Jocko Valley and the Mission Mountains rising straight up into the clouds, the rock face of each mountain so high above the floor of the valley that the waterfalls stay frozen year round.

As Wyatt stepped up on the porch and went inside, the bikers tried not to look directly at him or let their tone of voice change or their words catch in their throats. Each man was left wondering if anyone had detected the few seconds of uncontrolled fear that had gripped his heart.

Wyatt sat at a table in the back of the saloon and ordered, and soon an enormous Indian in a floppy black hat and jeans whose cuffs were stained with green manure sat down with him, his face as expressionless as a skillet. Wyatt wrote out a check and tore it loose from his checkbook and handed it to the Indian. The Indian folded the check and buttoned it into his shirt pocket and shook hands and left, hardly speaking a word. Then a second and a third Indian came to the table and sat down with Wyatt and received a check and left. When Wyatt looked up again, two large men, one in a deputy’s uniform, the other in a baggy suit, were standing in his light.

“Howdy-doody, boys,” he said.

“The sheriff wants to see you,” the man in the suit said.

“How’d y’all know where to find me?”

“Your neighbors across the river,” the uniformed deputy said, smiling. He was an auxiliary and hardly more than a boy and had a mouth like a girl’s.