Light of the World (6 page)

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.

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Funny place to drink soda pop, Wyatt,” the man in the suit said. He glanced up at the stage, where three girls were gyrating and twisting on chromed poles. “I’d think you’re too old for eye candy.”

“I do business with a bunch of feed growers and cutting-horse breeders up the Jocko. This is where I meet them at.”

“That’s interesting. We didn’t know that,” the man in the suit said, jotting something on a notepad. He was a plainclothes sheriff’s detective by the name of Bill Pepper whose manner and way of doing business seemed to come from an earlier time. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes and wore his hair in a buzz cut and spoke with a Deep South accent, although he had been with LAPD many years and never mentioned where he’d grown up. His eyes were recessed and as dead as buckshot, his lips gray, his coat slightly askew from the lead-weighted blackjack shaped like a darning sock that he carried in the right pocket.

“Is this about that girl who says I shot an arrow at her?”

“She’s not a girl. She’s a grown woman. Grown women are sensitive about that these days.”

“So that’s what this is about?”

“What do you think?”

“I got no idea.”

“I left a business card in your door. I left one in your mailbox, too.”

“People stick trash in my door and mailbox every day.”

“Want to sit in a cell tonight?” Pepper said.

Wyatt folded his hands on top of the table, his face tight. He blew his nose on a bandana and stuck the bandana in his pocket. “I ain’t shot an arrow at nobody. I told that to your deputy. I told it to the girl and her father. Don’t fuck with me.”

“Lot of people say you’re a mean motor scooter. Is that what you are? A mean motor scooter?”

Wyatt stared straight ahead, his pupils like small black insects frozen inside glass.

“Let me ask you another question. You come in here a lot?” Pepper said.

“When I’m of a mind to.”

The plainclothes detective’s pen had gone dry. He clicked the button on it several times, then took another pen from his shirt pocket. “You know what ‘fortuitous’ means? In this instance it means we might be looking at you in a new light. Were you in here about a week ago?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you know an Indian girl by the name of Angel Deer Heart?”

“A little bitty thing, about seventeen or eighteen, her britches hanging off her seat?”

“That’s the one.”

“She’s the granddaughter of a big oilman. Yeah, I saw her in here. A couple of times.”

“You see her last Thursday night?”

“I don’t remember.”

“But you were here?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“Yeah, you did.” Pepper wrote again in his notebook. “You feel protective toward young girls?”

“I don’t get around them long enough to be protective.”

“Seems only natural, a rodeo man like you. You see a young thing at the bar with her panties showing, and you cruise on over and buy her a drink and tell her you’ll drive her home because she shouldn’t be hanging in a snatch patch full of guys who’d love to tear her apart. Did something like that happen?”

“If y’all had tended to your job, she wouldn’t have been drinking in here in the first place.”

“Does the court still make you take those chemical cocktails?”

“I took them of my own free will.”

“I hear they cause blackouts.”

“Is the sheriff still at his office?”

“No, you’ll see him tomorrow.”

“You taking me in?”

“I’m not sure. Is it true you speak in tongues?”

“It’s common up on the rez. Some do, some don’t.”

“Sounds to me like you need to visit the hospital at Warm Springs again, see if your batteries need charging.”

“I got two other feed growers waiting on me. Hook me up or get out of my face.”

“We’ll see you at the courthouse at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow, Wyatt. The reason I’m not taking you in is I don’t think you’re worth shooting, much less wasting a cell on.” The detective put away his notebook and pen and stuck an unlit cigarette in his mouth. He leaned over and raked a kitchen match across the tabletop, even though state law prohibited smoking in the bar. His coat touched Wyatt’s shoulder, an odor of dried sweat wafting off his body. He blew out the match and dropped it in Wyatt’s soda can. “I think we’re gonna have to do something about you, boy,” he said.

After Pepper had walked away, the uniformed auxiliary said, “I’m sorry about that. He’s had a bad day. Everybody has.”

Wyatt looked up at him. “Y’all found that Indian girl?”

“Six hours ago,” the auxiliary said. He glanced toward the front door, then at the women dancing on the runway. “Wyatt?”

“What?”

“You didn’t?”

“Didn’t what?”

“You know. With the girl, I mean. You didn’t have anything to do with—”

“Get out of my sight,” Wyatt said.

T
HERE WAS EITHER
a malfunction in the furnace or someone had turned up the register too high, but when Alafair stepped through the door of the interview room at the prison east of Wichita, she felt a surge of superheated air that was like damp wool on her skin; she also smelled an odor that made her think of an unventilated locker
room and pipe-tobacco smoke that had soaked into someone’s clothes. Asa Surrette was seated at a metal table, his wrists manacled to a waist chain, his khaki shirt buttoned at the throat. He had wide, thin shoulders, shaped a bit like a suit coat hanging on a rack, and a sharp bloodless nose that gave him the appearance of a man breathing cold or rarefied air. His eyes looked pasted on his face.

Alafair sat down at the table and placed her notebook and a pen and a recorder next to one another. Through the oblong windows in the door and the wall, she could see two correctional officers monitoring the hallway and the rooms that were usually reserved for lawyer-client meetings. “You have a degree in administration of justice?” she said.

He watched her pick up her pen. “I took writing courses, too.”

“But you were a criminal science major?”

“Yes, but I never wanted to be a policeman. I thought about it, but it wasn’t for me.”

“You had aspirations to be a writer?” When she tried to smile, her face felt stiff and unnatural. Also, there was a pain in her chest, as though someone had pressed a thorn close to her heart. She tried not to bite the corner of her lip.

His eyes shifted sideways, the manacles tightening against the waist chain. “I studied with a professor who claimed he was a friend of Leicester Hemingway, Ernest’s brother. Maybe he was just bragging. He wouldn’t read one of my stories in front of the class.”

“What was in the story?”

“I forget. Something that bothered him. He took it to the head of the creative writing program. I thought he was a silly guy. He said he’d published some novels. I think he was probably a fake.” He stared into her face as though waiting for her to confirm or deny his perception.

“What would you like to talk about?” she said.

“I’m waiting for you to ask the question they all ask.”

“I don’t know what that is.”

“Don’t lie. You know what the question is. It’s not
a
question, either. It’s
the
question. It’s the only reason any of you come here.”

“Why did you torture and kill all those people, Mr. Surrette?”

“See?” His eyes were dark brown and contained a greasy shine, like rainwater in a wood barrel that never saw sunlight. His teeth were widely spaced, the back of his tongue visible when he breathed through his mouth.

“Are you asthmatic?” she said.

“Sometimes. I was asthmatic when I needed to get out of the navy.”

“I want to clarify something. You’re operating under a misconception,” she said. “I have no expectation that you will ever tell me or anyone else why you tortured and killed all those innocent people. In all probability, you will never deliberately reveal your secrets. You’ll refuse to tell family members where the bodies of their loved ones are buried. Your legacy will be the suffering you leave behind, and you’ll leave as much of it as you can.”

“Not true.”

“What you don’t understand, Mr. Surrette, is your deeds and your motivations are scientifically inseparable. A cause has an effect. An effect has a cause. Nothing happens in a vacuum. A physical act is the consequence of an electrical impulse in the brain. It’s like watching a moth in a windstorm. The outcome is immediately demonstrable. It’s not a complex idea.”

His eyes seemed to dull over, as though for a few seconds he had slipped sideways in time and was no longer in the room. She could see a piece of food in his teeth and dried mucus at the corner of his mouth. “Who was it that said don’t try to understand me too soon?” he asked.