Light of the World (32 page)

“Wyatt is not the person you need to worry about,” she said. “I want to pop you and do it in pieces. I hope you keep lying. I’ve got a feeling you’ve hurt lots of women, and all of them will be cheering when we drop you in a Dumpster. Want to clear your conscience?”

“I’m a gardener. I stacked time when I was young. I got a good job in Carson City and cleaned up my act. If you know everything, check my sheet. I work for the Youngers, but I never talk to them. The old man is in his helicopter or in his library with his guns. The daughter-in-law acts like her shit don’t stink and we don’t exist. Caspian hands out the chores through the head groundsman.”

“Let me show you something, Miss Gretchen,” Wyatt said. He positioned himself in front of Tony Zappa and ripped open his shirt, popping off all the buttons. Then he tore the shirt off his shoulders and peeled it down his arms. “See that bruise on his forearm? That’s where I hit him with a cottonwood limb. See that gold hair on his chest? It was sticking out of his shirt when he come at me with the knife he took off me.” Dixon looked down at Zappa. “I told Miss Bertha I was gonna bring her your ears. She cried. That’s the kind of lady y’all ripped the clothes off. You smiling at me, boy?”

Wyatt picked up the telephone book and swung it with both hands into Zappa’s head. The chair toppled backward, Zappa falling with it hard against the floor, the back of his head thudding against the concrete beneath the carpet. He stared at the ceiling with the empty look of a man who had plunged backward to the bottom of a well. “I wasn’t smiling. I wasn’t doing anything,” he said. “Do to me whatever you want. I heard talk about a guy you’re not gonna like meeting.”

“Maybe the guy who did Bill Pepper?” Gretchen said.

“They say this guy can’t die. I’ve heard about what he’s done to some women. I hope you meet him. I hope I’m there to watch it.”

Gretchen squatted on her haunches so she could look directly into Tony Zappa’s face. She could smell the weed on his clothes and the beer on his breath and the deodorant layered under his armpits and the sunblock he had rubbed into his scalp and cornrows. She took her Airweight .38 special from her side pocket and flipped out the cylinder and removed four of the five rounds loaded in the chambers. “You were one of the guys who attacked Wyatt and his friend, weren’t you?”

“I never saw the guy. Why should I want to attack him?”

“Earlier tonight you were worried about a cowboy with a limp and a cut on his head. That’s the man you’re looking at right now. How could you describe him to me if you never saw him?”

The blood drained from Tony Zappa’s cheeks. Gretchen rotated the cylinder of the Airweight with her palm without looking at it, then snapped it back into the pistol’s frame. “Do you know who Percy Wolcott was?”

“No.”

“He was my friend. I think someone you know sabotaged his plane.”

“I never heard of him.”

“I had a feeling you might say that. Are you good at math?”

“What are you doing to me, lady?”

“There are five chambers in this revolver. Only one of them is loaded. On the first trigger pull, there is an eighty percent chance the hammer will come down on an unloaded chamber. To be honest with you, I don’t feel good about tormenting a man whose hands are taped behind his back. I’ll start the process, and maybe you’ll do the right thing and our situation will be over. If not, we’ll have to take it from there. You with me so far?”

“No,” he said, swallowing as he spoke.

She pulled back the hammer and placed the muzzle of the Airweight against the side of her head and squeezed the trigger. Her face jerked when the hammer snapped on an empty chamber. She heard Wyatt release his breath. “Miss Gretchen, don’t do that again,” he said.

“It’s your turn,” she said to Zappa.

“Lady, don’t do this to me,” he said.

“The chances are one in four that the next chamber is loaded. That means you have a seventy-five percent chance of being okay. Are you following me?”

“You’re going too fast.”

She touched the barrel to his temple and cocked back the hammer.

“Please,” he said. “You don’t know everything involved. I didn’t have a choice.”

“About hitting a man in the head with a baton?” she said. “About gang-raping a woman? You didn’t have a choice about that? You’re starting to piss me off.”

“Kill me. I don’t care.” Tears were welling in his eyes. “I saw pictures of what this guy has done. Go online. Somebody sold them to a guy who makes snuff films. Maybe it was the guy who sold them.”

“What guy? What’s his name?”

“I don’t know. I’m a gardener!” He squeezed his eyes shut and kicked his feet and ground his teeth.

Gretchen heard the roar of a truck engine on the other side of the wall, followed by someone pounding on the door and shouting: “Hey, asshole! Your Harley is being towed! Come outside and see
how
it’s being towed!”

Gretchen pulled back the curtain and looked outside. The clerk had backed up a wrecker to the handicap zone and attached a steel hook and cable around the Harley and hoisted it into the air so it was hanging at an angle, upside down, the handlebars and gas tank and engine partially on the concrete parking pad.

“Did you hear me, shit-breath?” the clerk shouted, pounding the door again. “I want to thank you for helping me quit this job! Put your plunger back in your pants and watch the show!”

The clerk climbed into the cab of the wrecker and shifted into gear and clanked forward into the street, dragging the Harley over the curb and banging it against a light pole. Then he gave the wrecker the gas and roared down Broadway, the Harley bouncing end over end, skittering off a fireplug, metal screeching, sparks geysering in the dark as he made a wide turn at the intersection.

Gretchen and Wyatt were standing at the window, dumbfounded, the curtain peeled back. “I don’t believe this,” she said.

“This ain’t too good, Miss Gretchen,” Wyatt said.

The reversal of their situation was not over. Behind them, Tony Zappa picked himself up from the floor, wobbled once or twice, and charged through the side window, smashing through the curtain and glass, the chair on his back, landing on the gravel slope behind the building. Upon impact, the chair splintered into sticks, and in seconds he was running across the rocks along the river’s edge, his wrists still taped behind him, his ripped shirt streaming in rags.

“Time to get out of Dodge, Wyatt,” she said.

“I got to tell you something, Miss Gretchen. I don’t like what you done, snapping the gun at your head like that. It froze my heart up. You shouldn’t ought to do that, even if you was pretending. You was pretending, right?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “You’re a good fellow, Wyatt. Come on, I’ll buy you dinner.”

His face resembled a clay sculpture, his glasslike eyes absent of any emotion she could detect. She held her eyes on his. “Something wrong?” she asked.

“That smile of yours, it’s the light of the world,” he said. “You got the prettiest smile in the history of smiles, woman.”

G
ROWING UP IN
the old Irish Channel, down by Tchoupitoulas, Clete Purcel heard older boys and men share their knowledge about the opposite sex. He heard the same wisdom in the Marine Corps and from fellow cops and any number of newsmen and barroom personalities and frequenters of pool rooms and sports parlors. All spoke with authority about the rewards and perils of romance and gave the listener the sense that they had women of every stripe at their disposal. These great authorities on sexual relationships knew every detail about the joys of copulation as well as some of the pitfalls, which they reduced to the cynical and succinct statements that entertain the readers of pulp fiction and please those who have the thinking powers of earthworms. Here are a few bits of bedroom wisdom passed by these wise and worldly men:

1) Don’t go to bed with a woman who has more problems than you.

2) Divorcées and widows can’t get enough.

3) Catholic girls are better in the sack because they’re full of guilt and stay on rock and roll right down to the finish line.

4) Black women have more powerful libidos than white women and are always eager to get it on with white men.

5) Old ladies make outstanding mistresses because they are not only mature but their parts are tender and they are ever so grateful (this observation was made by Benjamin Franklin).

This is the counsel that millions of men and boys have heard and probably on occasion taken seriously. Once in a long while, inside a late-night bar or the cab of a long-haul semi or a foxhole when trip flares are floating down over a piece of third-world moonscape, you might hear a cautionary word connected to reality. Someone who has strayed from his marital vows, or betrayed his lover’s trust, or destroyed his family or someone else’s, will describe to you in painful detail the nightmare that can be yours if you make one wrongheaded decision.

If the errant lover or husband is willing to tell you everything, he will confess his naïveté. He will say he had no idea how many lives would be affected by his decision. He will acknowledge that none of the players was either all good or all bad but were little more than children. This is not a welcome revelation for those men who wish to feel that the cuckold precipitated his own fate or that he was saving the adulterous wife from an abusive marriage or that he was lured into the situation. It’s no fun to discover you’ve been swindled. It’s even worse when you discover that the swindler is you.

Clete arranged to meet Felicity at the stone cabin on Sweathouse Creek Sunday evening and got there before she did. The sun was gone, and the air was cold and smelled of the creek and the lichen on the stone walls of the canyon. When she arrived, she was wearing a long dark dress with tiny white flowers and a white lace hem, and a knitted white sweater and a tiny hat like a woman from the early twentieth century would wear. Her hand was shaking when she turned the key in the plated lock on the door.

“Are you okay?” he asked when they were inside.

“I’m not sure,” she said. “We just made our first visit to Angel’s grave. Something happened that really bothers me. Caspian cried. I’ve never seen him do that.”

“That’s the way people behave in those situations,” he replied.
Those situations? They were talking about the murder of a child. What was he saying?

“Caspian never shows his feelings,” she said. “He always has this little smile on his face, like he knows something you don’t.”

“The reason I wanted to talk to you, Felicity—”

“You don’t have to tell me. It’s written all over you. You made a mistake. I’m a nice lady and deserve better. We have to be mature people about this and be objective and say good-bye. Blah, blah, blah. Usually, men choose a restaurant to say these things so the woman can’t yell and throw things.”

“I wasn’t going to say that. I was going to tell you how much I like you, and like being with you, and like the way you talk and carry yourself. You’re grieving over your daughter, and a guy like me seems like a safe harbor for a little while. I don’t want to hurt you, that’s all. You don’t know my history. Dave and I put some guys down real hard. They’re not coming back.”

“Why did you want to meet?”

“Because I want to know why you haven’t split from your husband. Or maybe I wondered if you want to split with him now. I’m not good at figuring things out sometimes.”

She sat down on a cloth-covered couch by the far wall. Through the window behind her, Clete could see the limbs of a cottonwood thrashing in the wind and the flicker of lightning on the canyon wall. “When I married Caspian, I was a good girl. I was mad at my father for going to South America and getting himself killed. I strayed sometimes, but I felt sorry about it later and tried to do right. Caspian said he loved me and he’d never slept with another woman. I didn’t believe him, but after a while I thought he was telling the truth. Caspian’s money could have bought him any woman he wanted, but the only love he cared about was the one he couldn’t have—the love of his father.”

“I can relate to that,” Clete said. “Except you got to grow up and stop resenting people for what they did to you when you were a kid. You got a drink?”

“Are you talking about me resenting my father? Is that why we’re out here?”

“No, I just need a drink. What do you have?”

“There’s some Bacardi and Coca-Cola in the refrigerator. Why don’t you lay off it for a while?”

“I don’t feel like laying off it. Go on with what you were saying.”

“Oh, Clete, I feel like such a fool when I talk this way,” she said, putting her hands in her lap and lowering her head. “I told you I was angry at my father, but the truth is, I loved him and I was proud of the name he gave me and I wanted to be brave like the woman who died in the arena. I used to go to church and try to be charitable toward people, and I thought marrying Caspian would be wonderful and we’d live in all the magical places we talked about. I slept around and I was selfish, and any criticism others make of me is justified. What bothers me most about Angel’s death is that she’s dead and I’m alive.”