Light of the World (4 page)

The news of his death went out over the wire services and was soon consigned to the category of good riddance and forgotten. Also forgotten was the account given by the autistic boy whose breath had fogged the window just before the scarecrow man silhouetted against the truck’s headlights. But historical footnotes are tedious and uninteresting. Why should the little boy’s tale be treated any differently?

I
DIDN’T WANT TO
be unfair to Gretchen. Her childhood had been one of neglect and abuse. No, that’s not quite accurate. Her childhood
had been horrific. Her body was burned with cigarettes when she was an infant. Many years later, Clete Purcel caught up with the man who did it, out on the flats, on the backside of Key West. Later, a man’s skin and most of his bones washed out of a sandbar, a Bic cigarette lighter wedged in what was left of the thorax.

At age six, Gretchen was sodomized by her mother’s boyfriend, a psychopath named Bix Golightly who did smash-and-grab jewel-store robberies and fenced the loot through the Dixie Mafia. Last year Gretchen took a pro bono contract on Golightly and found him sitting in his van at night in Algiers, across the river from New Orleans; she planted three rounds in his face. Clete saw it happen and called in a shots-fired but protected his daughter’s identity. His love for the daughter and his attempts at atonement almost cost him his life.

I liked Gretchen. She had many of her father’s virtues. There was no doubt that she was fearless. There was no doubt she was intelligent. I also believed that her contrition for her former life was real. However, there is a peculiar atavistic mechanism built into each of us that doesn’t always coincide with our thought processes. A tuning fork buried in the human breast develops a tremolo when we come in contact with certain kinds of people. Ask any career cop about former felons of his acquaintance who have stacked serious time in a maximum-security joint and were stand-up and took everything the system and the prison culture could throw at them and came out of it fairly intact and went to work as carpenters and welders and married decent women and started families. Every good cop is glad to witness that kind of success story. But when one of those same guys moves next door to you, or asks to come by your house, or introduces himself to your wife and children in the grocery store, a film projector clicks on in your head and you see images from this man’s past that you cannot stop thinking about. As a consequence, you create an invisible moat around your castle and loved ones and subtly indicate that it is not to be crossed by the wrong people, no matter how unfair that might seem.

I was helping Albert scrub out the horse tank in the south pasture when I saw Gretchen’s chopped-down hot-rod pickup coming up
the dirt road from the state highway, the soft-throated rumble of the twin Hollywood mufflers echoing off the hillsides. “Albert?” I said.

“What?” he replied, obviously irritated that I had chosen to use his name as a question rather than simply ask him the question. His denim sleeves were rolled up on his arms, the exposed skin sprinkled with purple-and-blackish-brown discolorations that he refused to see a dermatologist about. Few of his university colleagues ever knew that Albert had been a drifter and roustabout and migrant farmworker at age seventeen and had done six months spreading tar on a Florida road gang. The greatest contradiction about Albert lay in the antithetical mix of his egalitarian social views and work-hardened physicality with his patrician features and Southern manners, as though his creator had decided to install the soul of Sidney Lanier in the body of a hod carrier.

“Did Clete tell you very much about Miss Gretchen?” I asked.

“He said she was planning to make a documentary on shale-oil extraction.”

“Did he tell you about her background?”

“He said she just finished film school.”

“She got mixed up with some bad dudes in Miami.”

He was bent over the rim of the tank, scrubbing a ring of dried red bacteria off its sides. I could hear him breathing above the sound of the bristles scraping against the aluminum. “What kind of bad dudes are we talking about?”

“Greaseballs from Brooklyn and Staten Island. Maybe some Cuban hitters in Little Havana.”

He nodded, still moving the brush back and forth. “I never liked the term ‘greaseballs.’ I know you use it to characterize a state of mind and not ethnicity. Just the same, I don’t like it.”

“Forget political correctness. She did contract hits, Albert.”

This time he stopped working. He was crouched on his knees, one arm resting on the lip of the tank. “Why isn’t she in jail?”

“Clete and I looked the other way. I don’t always feel real good about that.”

“Is she mobbed up now?”

“No, she’s done with it.”

He watched Gretchen’s hot rod come up the dirt road, the horses running beside it along the rail fence. “I had chains on my ankles when I was eighteen. I watched two hacks put a man on an anthill. I saw a boy locked in a corrugated tin sweatbox that almost cooked his brain. I was in a parish prison in Louisiana when a man was electrocuted twenty feet from the lockdown unit I was in. I could hear him weeping when they strapped him down.”

“I had to inform you, Albert.”

“Yeah, I know. If you were me, what would you do?”

I had to collect my thoughts before I spoke. “I’d ask her to leave.”

“Going to Mass this Sunday?” he said.

“You know how to rub the salt in the wound.”

He began hosing off the inside of the tank, tilting it sideways to force the water through the drain hole in the bottom. “We didn’t have this conversation.”

“Sir?”

He glanced at the sky. “It looks like more rain. We can use as much as we can get. Those goddamn oil companies are cooking the whole planet.”

I resolved that one day I would ask Albert why his colleagues at the university had not shot him long ago.

Gretchen turned off the dirt road and drove under the arch above Albert’s driveway and parked in front of the house. She walked across the front lawn, past the flower baskets hanging from the deck, and stopped at the pedestrian gate to the pasture where we were cleaning and refilling the horse tank. She had reddish-blond hair and Clete’s clear complexion and eyes that were the color of violets and the same erect posture that made both her and Clete look taller than they were. Also like her father, she was bold and irreverent but could not be called bitter or unduly aggressive. There’s a serious caveat to that. Like most individuals who have been abandoned and left to suffer at the hands of predators, Gretchen viewed the world with suspicion, analyzed every word in a conversation, considered all promises suspect, and sent storm warnings to anyone who tried to impose his way on her.

Her skin was deeply tanned, her gold neck chain and Star of
David exposed on her chest, the sun shining on her hair. “I wasn’t sure if I should drive down to the cabin or turn in to the drive,” she said.

“Hello, Gretchen,” I said, feeling both awkward and hypocritical. “This is Albert Hollister. He’s our host.”

“Welcome to Lolo, Montana, Ms. Horowitz,” he said. “We like to say we’re very humble in Lolo.”

“What a wonderful place you have,” she replied. “Do you own the whole valley?”

“Plum Creek owns the crown of the hill behind the house, but the rest is mine.”

She gazed at the arroyo that ran from Albert’s improvised gun range up to an unused logging road that traversed the top of the hill and disappeared inside stands of Douglas fir that were as fat as Christmas trees. “I saw a man up there. He must be a logger,” she said.

“No, Plum Creek doesn’t log up there anymore. They’re selling everything off,” Albert said.

“I saw a guy on that log road. He looked right at me,” she said. “He was wearing a slicker with a hood. It must be wet up there.”

“Did you see his face?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “Having trouble with the neighbors?”

“Alafair thinks a guy farther down the ridge shot an arrow at her,” I said.

“Why would someone do that?”

“We don’t know,” I said. I put my hands in my back pockets and gazed at the ground. I felt deceitful and totally lacking in charity toward someone who’d had a horrible childhood imposed upon her. I wished I had said nothing to Albert about Gretchen’s background. “I’m glad you’re here.”

She stared at the blue-green roll of the mountains to the south. When her eyes came back to mine, she was smiling, her cheeks full of color. The sun was bright on her face and hair and her gold chain and the tops of her breasts. She looked as though she had been caught in a camera’s lens during a moment when she could only be described as absolutely stunning. “I appreciate that, Dave,
more than you can know. Thanks for inviting me, Mr. Hollister,” she said.

I couldn’t remember when I had felt so small.

I
WENT INTO THE
kitchen, where my wife, Molly, was slicing tomatoes on a breadboard. “Gretchen Horowitz is here,” I said.

The knife slowed and stopped. “Oh,” she said.

“I told Albert of her background. I told him maybe it would be better if Gretchen moved on. I actually told him to say that to her.”

“Don’t give yourself too much credit, Streak. Albert has two ways of doing things. There’s Albert’s way. Then there’s Albert’s way.”

Molly had the shoulders and hands of a countrywoman, and an Irish mouth and heavy arms and white skin dusted with sun freckles. Her hair was a dull red and silver on the roots; though she kept it cut short, it had a way of falling in her eyes when she worked. She was my moral compass, my navigator, my partner in everything, braver than I, more compassionate, more steadfast when the storm clouds started rolling. She had been a nun who never took vows; she worked with the Maryknolls in El Salvador and Guatemala during a time when Maryknoll women were raped and killed and the administration in Washington looked the other way. Former Sister Molly Boyle should have been running the Vatican, at least in my view.

She looked through the window at the horses grazing down the slope in the shade, their tails slashing at the insects that were starting to rise from the grass as the day warmed. I knew she was thinking about Gretchen and the violence we thought we had left behind in Louisiana.

“Gretchen saw a man looking at her from the hillside,” I said. “Albert says there’s no reason for anybody to be up there.”

“You think it’s the rodeo guy Alafair had trouble with?”

“I’m going to take a walk up there now.”

“I’ll come along.”

“There’s no need for you to. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

She wiped her hands on a dish towel. “My foot,” she said.

We climbed up the trail behind the house, through pine and fir
and larch trees widely spaced in an arroyo that stayed in deep shade most of the day. At the top of the trail was the old Plum Creek logging road, shaped like a horseshoe and partially eroded and caved in and dotted with seedlings and heaped in places with piles of barkless and worm-eaten trees that had slid down from the bluff during the spring melt. The incline at the top of the trail was steep, and I was perspiring and breathing harder than I wanted to admit when we gained the road near the ridge. The wind was cold on my face, the sun shining through the canopy like shafts of light in a cathedral, my head reeling. When I looked back down at the valley, Albert’s three-story house looked like it had been miniaturized.

“You okay, skipper?” Molly said.

“I’m fine,” I said, my heart pounding. I looked in both directions on the road. I expected to see oil and brake fluid cans and lunch trash left behind by loggers, but the road was clean and the slopes below it carpeted with pine needles, the outcroppings of rock gray and striated by erosion and spotted with bird droppings.

It was an idyllic scene, one that seemed to have healed itself after years of clear-cutting and neglect. It was one of the moments when you feel that indeed the earth abideth forever, and that all the industrial abuse we’ve done to it will somehow disappear with time.

At the place where the logging road dead-ended in a huge pile of dirt and burned tree stumps, I saw the sunlight flash on a metallic surface. “Stay behind me,” I said.

“What is it?” Molly asked.

“Probably nothing.”

I walked ahead of her along the base of the bluff, through a low spot in the road where the soil was dark from the morning rain and marked by the tracks of someone wearing needle-nosed cowboy boots. The tracks were deep and sharp-edged and beaded with moisture in the center, as though the soil under the boot had been compressed only minutes earlier. Farther on, lying in the dirt next to a round boulder, were an empty potted-meat can, broken pieces of saltine crackers, and a spray of what looked like fingernail clippings.

There was no movement in the trees, no sound anywhere, not even a pinecone rolling down the hillside. A line of sweat ran from
my armpit down my side. Below, I saw the wind bend the grass in Albert’s pasture, then climb the hillside and sway the canopy against the sun.

“Good God, what’s that smell?” Molly said.

I walked another ten yards up the road and held up my hand for her to stop. “Don’t come any farther,” I said.

“Tell me what it is.”

“It’s disgusting. Stay back.”

Someone had defecated in the middle of the road and made no attempt to dig a hole or cover it up. Horseflies were swarming on the spot. Up above, behind a cluster of bushes, was an opening to a cave. I picked up a rock the size of a baseball and chunked it through the brush and heard it strike stone. “Come on out here, podna,” I said.

There was only quiet. I threw a second and then a third rock with the same result. I grabbed hold of a tree trunk and pulled myself up on the slope and walked toward the cave, the ground spongy with rainwater and pine needles. I could hear Molly climbing the slope behind me. I turned and tried to signal her to stop. But that was not the way of Molly Boyle and never would be.

“Hey, buddy, we’re not your enemies,” I said. “We just want to know who you are. We’re not going to call the cops on you.”

This time when I spoke, I was close enough to the cave to create an echo and feel the cool air and smell the bat guano and pooled water inside. I took a penlight from my pocket and stepped under the overhang and shined the light on the back wall. I could see the dried skin of an animal on the floor, ribs poking through the fur, eye sockets empty.