Light of the World (23 page)

That was exactly what Clete did, gazing up at the strips of pink cloud in the sky and at the trees bending in the wind on the hillside. I knew we were in for it.

A
T FIRST LIGHT
Tuesday morning, Wyatt Dixon woke from a nightmare, one that left his armpits damp and turned his heart into gelatin. For Wyatt, the dream was not about the past or the present; nor did it have a beginning or an end. Instead, the dream was omnipresent in Wyatt’s life, and it waited for him whenever he closed his eyes, whether day or night. In the dream, the man he grew up calling “Pap” was walking toward him bare-chested in his strap overalls, his skin as shriveled and bloodless as a mummy’s, his bony hand knotted into a fist. “You touch your sister again, boy? Your mother seen you,” Pap was saying. “Don’t lie. It’ll go twice as hard if you lie. You worthless little pisspot. The best part of you run down your mother’s leg.”

Wyatt got up and put on his jeans and went outside barefoot and shirtless into the cold morning and the mist that was a ghostly blue in the cottonwoods and as bright as silver dollars on the steel swing bridge over the river. The current was dark green and swirling in giant eddies around the boulders and beaver dams on the edges of the main channel, and wild roses were blooming along the banks. The dawn was so soft and cool and tangible, Wyatt believed he could taste it in the back of his mouth and breathe it into his lungs. He pulled a tarp off a woodpile and threw it on the grass and lay on his back with his arm over his eyes, his chest rising and
falling slowly, the world once again a place of leafy trees and a breeze blowing down a canyon and German brown trout undulating in the riffle. Just that fast, Pap had gone away and become the bag of bones that someone finally dropped in a hole in a potter’s field.

When Wyatt awoke, the sun had just broken above the canyon, and he could hear footsteps clanging on the steel grid of the swing bridge and the cables creaking with the tension created by weight. He sat up and saw a heavyset woman in a suit and heels trying to work her way down the slope without falling, a notebook in her hand.

Where had he seen her? At the revival on the rez?

“Could I have a word with you, Mr. Dixon?” she asked.

The breeze was at her back. He closed and opened his eyes. “What the hell is that smell?” he said, looking around.

“I guess that’s my perfume.”

“Who are you?”

“Bertha Phelps. I’m doing an article on charismatic religions among Native Americans.”

“I was about to fix breakfast.”

“I don’t mind,” she replied.

You don’t mind what?
he thought. He took her inventory. “I’ve seen you before.”

“Could I ask you some questions?”

He broke off a blade of grass and put it in his mouth. “Whatever blows your skirt up,” he replied.

She followed him into the house. He put on a long-sleeved shirt without buttoning it and started a fire in the woodstove. There was so much clutter in his kitchen that there was hardly a spot to sit down. He went into the living room and returned with a straight-back chair and set it beside her. “Take a load off,” he said.

“I heard you speaking in tongues Sunday afternoon,” she said.

“You were the woman talking to Mr. Robicheaux.”

“That’s right. Were you raised Pentecostal?”

“I didn’t have
no
raising, unless that’s what you call breaking corn and picking cotton from cain’t-see to cain’t-see.”

“Would you say you found your religion through the Indians?”

“I never give it much thought.”

“You had a hard life, didn’t you?”

“No.”

“Other people say you did.”

He cracked four eggs and plopped the yolks in a skillet and set the skillet on one of the stove lids. “Maybe other people ought to mind their own goddamn business.”

She leaned over her notebook to write in it. She rubbed her pen back and forth on the paper, trying to make ink come out of it. “Drat,” she said.

“That’s them kind Walmart sells. They’re about as good for writing as tent pegs.”

“I have another one in my purse,” she said.

He looked at her with increasing curiosity. “You’re not here to ask me about the revival, are you?”

“I’m also doing an article on the local Indians.”

“You know where I saw that kind of ballpoint before?”

“You just told me. At Walmart.”

“There was a cop here’bouts named Bill Pepper. He carried ballpoints just like that one in your hand. He was the kind of man who did things on the cheap. Did you happen to know Detective Pepper?”

“The name is familiar.”

“While I was in his custody, I heard him talking on his phone to Love Younger. I think the good detective was on a pad for Mr. Younger.”

“A what?”

“Detective Pepper was taking money on the side. That’s what cops call being on a pad.”

“You’re saying this police officer was corrupt?”

He looked through the back window at a doe and a fawn crossing through the shadows, their hooves stenciling the damp grass. They looked back at him, flipping their tails, theirs noses twitching. “I’m saying you got something on your mind, lady, and it ain’t religion.”

“I wondered if you knew the murdered Indian girl.”

“The Youngers sent you here?”

“No, sir, I’m here on my own.”

“You from down south?” he said.

“I’ve lived there.”

Wyatt opened the window and picked up a magazine from the drainboard and fanned his face with it.

“Does my perfume bother you?”

“I guess I’ve smelled worse.”

She seemed to concentrate on a reply but couldn’t think of one.

“If you see the Youngers, I want you to tell them something for me.”

“I’ve already told you I don’t work for them. I’m a freelance journalist.”

“Right. Tell Mr. Younger I know what he can do to me if he takes a mind. But I’ll leave my mark on him before we get done. He’ll know when it’s my ring, too.”

“If you want to make threats, Mr. Dixon, you’ll have to do that on your own.”

“It ain’t no threat.”

“I think maybe I should leave.”

“Suit yourself.”

She stood up, then looked out the window at the deer. “There’s corn on the grass,” she said.

“The doe’s got a hurt leg. I put it out at night for her and the fawn.”

“Isn’t that illegal?”

“I didn’t check.”

“Maybe you are a kinder man than you pretend to be, Mr. Dixon,” she said. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

“You’re a right handsome woman, if a little on the heavy side,” he said.

“That’s supposed to be a compliment?”

“I’d call it a statement of fact. You’re a nice-looking lady. I get out of sorts sometime. You already ate breakfast?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Stick around.”

“I’m not sure for what purpose.”

“My huevos rancheros ain’t half bad. I got coffee and biscuits, too. There’s a bowl of pineapple in the icebox I chopped up. I learned cooking in the army before they kicked me out.”

“You do have manners,” she said.

“You’re working for Love Younger, though, ain’t you?”

“I most certainly am not. I do not care for Mr. Younger. I do not care for his ilk, his progeny, or the industries he owns.”

“What was that second one?”

“His offspring. They’re like their father. They’re notorious for their lack of morality.”

He snapped the buttons into place on his cowboy shirt, the tails splaying across his narrow hips. He pulled on his boots and filled the coffeepot under the spigot, his mouth a slit, his eyes as empty as glass.

“Is there some reason you’re not speaking to me now?” she asked.

“There’s something you hid from me. I just ain’t figured out what it is,” he replied. His eyes rested on the ballpoint in her hand. “You like ham or a chunk of steak with your eggs?”

W
YATT DIXON HAD
never been on the property of a wealthy man and had always assumed that the geographical passage from the world of those who ate potatoes and those whose bread was served on a gold plate would involve rumbling over a drawbridge and a moat, not simply driving up a maple-shaded road through an open gate and cutting his engine in front of a ten-thousand-square-foot mansion overlooking the Clark Fork of the Columbia River.

The gardens were bursting with flowers, the lawn a blue-green mixture of fescue and clover and Bermuda grass. Three men who looked like gardeners were watering the flowers and weeding the beds, hummingbirds hanging in midair above them, the sun a yellow flame through trees that grew higher than the roof.

One of the gardeners snipped a rose and set it in a bucket of water and walked toward Wyatt, sticking his cloth gloves in his back pocket, smiling behind a pair of Ray-Ban wraparounds. His hair was
gold and braided in cornrows, his tanned scalp popping with perspiration. A red spider was tattooed on the back of one hand. “You the plumber?” he said.

“I look like a plumber?” Wyatt replied.

The gardener gazed up the driveway at the road and at the sunlight spangling in the canopy, his smile never leaving his mouth. His lips had no color and seemed glued on his face. “You’re lost and you need directions?”

“I got a message for Mr. Love Younger. Is he home?”

The gardener took a two-way phone from a pouch on his belt. “I can ask.”

Wyatt glanced at an upstairs window from which an elderly man was looking back. “Is that him yonder?” he said.

“What’s your name, buddy?” the gardener said.

Wyatt pulled the walkie-talkie from the gardener’s hand and pushed the talk button. “Howdy-doody, Mr. Younger. This is Mr. Dixon. You got yourself a little-bitty teensy-weensy pissant down here deciding who talks to you and who don’t. I need to have a word with you about the death of your granddaughter. You want to come down here or not?”

“You’re the rodeo man who sold her the bracelet?” a voice replied.

“Yes, sir, that would be yours truly. I sold it to her in the biker joint she didn’t have no business in.”

“Stay right there,” the voice said.

A moment later, a man with a broad forehead and vascular arms and a glare emerged from the front door. When Wyatt extended his hand and stepped toward him, the man with the cornrows and another gardener grabbed his upper arms, struggling to get their fingers around the entirety of his triceps.

“Let him go,” Younger said.

“Thank you, kind sir. Breeding shows every time,” Wyatt said, straightening a crick out of his neck. “A journalist named Bertha Phelps come to see me this morning. I think maybe she’s working for you, but she says that ain’t true.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Younger said.

“The cops are trying to put your granddaughter’s murder on me. The one who tried hardest was Bill Pepper. I bet you know who he is. Or rather, who he was.”

“I do.”

“You were paying him?”

“Why have you come here, Mr. Dixon?”

“To find out why y’all are trying to do me in.”

“I have no interest in you at all, except for the fact that you were the last person to see my granddaughter alive.”

“That’s a lie, Mr. Younger. Every biker in the Wigwam saw her. Except I’m the only man there what got pulled in.”

Younger held his gaze on Wyatt’s face. “I understand you have quite a history. You ever kill anyone, Mr. Dixon?”

“They say I busted a cap on a rapist.”

“But you didn’t do it?”

“I’m just telling you what they say. In prison you don’t ever ask a man what he done. You ask, ‘What do they
say
you did?’ ”

“I think you’re a dangerous and violent man.”

“Not no more, I ain’t. Not unless people fuck with me.”

“You can’t use that language here,” Younger said. “State your purpose or leave.”

Wyatt folded his arms on his chest and looked at the Tudor-style house and the beige walls and the purple rockwork around the windows and entranceways and the flowers blooming as big as cantaloupes in the beds. “I just wondered why a man who owned all this would hire a small-town flatfoot and general loser like Bill Pepper to give grief to a man what ain’t done him nothing. You must be pretty goddamn bored.”

“I’ve done you no harm. Don’t you dare say I have.”

“What do you call tasing a man?”

“I don’t even know what the term means.”

“You have a reason for staring into my face like that?” Wyatt said.

“Where’d you grow up?”

“Northeast Texas, just south of the Red.”

“You have unusual eyes.”

“What’s my place of birth have to do with my eyes?”

“Nothing. I have a feeling you want trouble. I don’t think you’ll be happy until you get it.”

Wyatt peeled the paper off a lollipop and stuck the lollipop in his jaw. “There
is
one other thing you can tell me, because it’s perplexed me for years. It’s got to do with the unpleasant subject of incest and such. I heard this tale about a mountain boy in Kentucky who married a girl from the next hollow and learned on their wedding night she was a virgin. In the morning he sent her back to her folks. When his daddy asked him how come he kicked her out, the boy said she was a virgin. His pap said, ‘You done the right thing, son. If she ain’t good enough for her own family, she ain’t good enough for ours, either.’ Is that story true?”