Light of the World (27 page)

“You’re a nice gentleman in every way, Wyatt, but you must stop calling me ‘miss.’ We are not on the plantation,” she said.

“I need to own up to something.” He folded his arms and looked at the ground, a strange tingling in his wrists that he didn’t understand. “I hope it don’t make you mad.”

“You know what the problem is? You’re not used to sharing your feelings. How could anyone get mad on a lovely afternoon like this?” She gazed at a towering cliff on the far side of the river and at the
thickness of the pines on the top. “In a place like this, we shouldn’t have a care in the world.”

“I went out to Love Younger’s place and had some words with him. I asked if you worked for him. He didn’t have no idea who you were. I was glad.”

“Why would I be angry about that?”

“I doubted your word.”

“Spread the blanket while I make our sandwiches. Tell me about your life in the rodeo.”

He shook his head. “You’re an educated woman. Why are you interested in a man such as myself?”

“Mine to know.”

“There’s people here’bouts who’d take a shithog to church before they’d invite me on a picnic. It’s not adding up for me.”

“Maybe I like you. Did you think of that?”

Wyatt rubbed his wrists, his facial skin as smooth and expressionless as clay, his eyes following an osprey gliding low over the river. “I don’t let people use me,” he said. “I just walk away from them. In the past I did a whole lot worse than that.”

“Someone has taught you that a good woman would never be attracted to you,” she said. “Someone did you a great wrong.”

“I ain’t good at this. That’s a pretty dress. It looks like it come from a florist.”

She was making the sandwiches on the tailgate of his truck. She turned her head toward him and smiled, her face lighting in a way that made something drop inside him. “You’re one of the most interesting men I have ever met. I think one of the nicest, too.”

“You got a way about you that ain’t ordinary. You’re a powerful woman.”

“I’m not sure what you mean.”

“You don’t let men push you around. It’s something a man senses. It’s what men admire in a woman most.”

“What are you trying to say?”

The river was wide and flat here, the grass tall and green on both banks of the river, the slopes heavily wooded near the base of cliffs that were gray and smooth and rose straight up into the sky. Why did
he feel enclosed, almost suffocated, by either his situation or the feelings churning inside him? Behind her, he could see a white-tailed buck on the edge of the timber, the points of his antlers curled and sharp and hard-looking in the light. There was not a house or a soul in sight. He looked at Bertha, then let his eyes slide off her face. “You’ve been hiding something. I need to know what it is,” he said.

“I thought you might be a bad man. You’re not. There’s a deep sense of goodness in you, that somebody tried to take away from you.”

“That ain’t true. Nobody’s ever taken anything away from me. They know better than to try.”

“You consider yourself saved, don’t you?”

“I don’t take nothing for granted. The state shot my head full of electricity and made me drink a bathtub-load of chemicals. Sometimes I think I hear my brain gurgling.”

“Fix us some lemonade. It’s so pleasant out here. When I come to a place like this, I stop thinking about all my cares and worries. Smell the wind? I bet that’s what the world smelled like when this was a field of ice lilies.”

“What cares and worries would a lady like you have?”

“More than you know. But you’re not the source of them.”

He removed his cowboy hat and set it on her head.

“Why’d you do that?” she said.

“It looks better on you than on me.”

The entirety of her face seemed suffused with a pink loveliness that he never thought he would associate with a woman who had upper arms as big as hams. His hat slipped down on the corner of her eye. “Go ahead,” she said.

“Go ahead what?”

“Do whatever you’re fixing to do.”

“I knew you were from the South.” He lifted his hat off her head and let it hang from his fingers behind her back while he kissed her on the mouth. Then he put his arms around her and did it again. She leaned back, still in his arms, and looked into his eyes, her stomach against his, her face glowing. “You feel like a stack of bricks,” she said. “Or maybe a leather bag full of rocks. Did anyone ever tell you that?”

“Not recently.”

“Your physique is very appealing, Mr. Dixon.”

“It’s mighty bright out here in the sun. Can we take our blanket over yonder in the trees?”

She blew out her breath. “Right here is lovely,” she said. “Oh, my heavens, what a marvelous afternoon. Hurry, now. Don’t be embarrassed. What finer place for love than the earth? That’s Robert Frost.”

He didn’t catch that last part, but he didn’t really care. Congress with Bertha Phelps was not what he’d expected. Over the years most of his relationships with women had little to do with any consideration outside his skin. This time he felt he had stepped inside a rainbow. No, that wasn’t correct; it was more than that. Bertha’s sexual embrace of his body was like riding a winged horse or giving himself up to a cresting wave or swimming through warm water carpeted with flowers, and all the while she kept moaning his name in his ear. A few minutes later he felt a weakness shudder through his body and a dam break in his loins, and he held her tighter, more dependently, than he’d ever held a woman in his life, his breath coming hard in his throat, his head on her breast.

Then he felt her stiffen under him and knew that something was terribly wrong. When he pushed himself up on his arms, her face was sweaty and white and disjointed with fear and surprise, her eyes fastened on someone standing directly behind him.

H
E LOOKED OVER
his shoulder and saw not one but three men silhouetted against the sky, all wearing gloves and plastic masks that were a bright metallic gray and gave the impression of a weeping specter with a downturned mouth and cheeks pooled with shadow. One of the men was holding a police baton, a lanyard looped around his wrist. He stepped forward as though on cue and swung it across Wyatt’s ear, putting his shoulder into it, snapping it like a baseball batter connecting with a fat pitch.

Wyatt suspected his eyes rolled but couldn’t be sure. The trees and mountains and sky suddenly reduced themselves to a pinpoint of light inside a sea of blackness, then the pinpoint disappeared, too. Wyatt fell sideways into the grass, naked except for his unsnapped cowboy shirt, a trickle of blood sliding down his neck.

When he woke, the shadow of his truck was in the same place where it had been when he was hit with the baton, but Bertha Phelps was gone. His hands were tied behind him with rope, and his wallet and its contents were scattered on the ground. He got on his knees and worked the rope under the bumper, then rose to a squat and strained against the rope to the point where he thought his molars would break. He took a breath and tried again, this time tearing the skin off his knuckles. Suddenly, he was free and standing erect, his head throbbing, his hands bleeding. He pulled on his underwear and
Wranglers and searched for his Tony Lama boots and the six-inch bone-handled Solingen clasp knife he carried. They were not there. Neither was the money in his wallet.

Who were they? Some guys fresh out of the can, maybe wiped out on crystal? These days the jails were full of guys with no class, all rut and penis and shit for brains. Where was Bertha?

The wind changed and he heard her voice up the slope, deep in the trees, and he had no doubt what the three men were doing to her.

He opened the back of the camper shell. His 1892 lever-action Winchester lay on the floor, but the shells for it were at his house. He reached into a duffel bag where he kept his camping gear and removed an army-surplus entrenching tool. The blade was locked into the straight-out position of a shovel, the edges of the blade filed clean and sharp. His gaze swept across the hillside, then he ran to the left of where the men had probably entered the trees with Bertha, the hatched scar tissue on his back as white as snow.

The floor of the forest was soft with damp grass and seepage from a spring in the hillside. To his right, inside a widely spaced stand of ponderosa lit by a solitary band of sunlight, two men were holding Bertha on her back while the third man attempted to mount her. When she tried to cry out, one man scooped a handful of dirt from the ground and poured it into her mouth.

They were still wearing their masks and apparently had not heard him coming. When they heard his bare feet running across the forest floor, they twisted their heads toward him in unison, frozen in time, like men who’d thought they possessed total control of the environment only to discover they had just locked themselves in a box with the most dangerous man they had ever met.

Wyatt’s upper body was streaming sweat and stenciled with nests of veins when he struck the first blow, catching the man on top of Bertha across the back, slicing through his shirt, slinging blood through the air. He wielded the e-tool like a medieval battle-ax and didn’t aim his blows or plan his attack. The power of his swing and the level of energy and rage that went into each blow was devastating and similar in effect to a jackhammer deconstructing a plywood house. Oddly, there was little sound inside the grove of columnlike
pines, other than the muffled grunts his adversaries made behind their masks whenever he hit them.

Bertha got to her feet, stumbling off balance down the hill, her backside covered with dirt and twigs and leaves and pine needles. Wyatt kicked a man in the groin and split his scalp when he doubled over, and was sure he broke a third man’s ribs when he stomped him on the ground.

There was blood on the trunks of the trees. Wyatt was revolving in a circle, hitting his assailants as many times as he could, inflicting as much bone damage as possible before their superiority in numbers took its toll. One man fell out of the fight and scrambled away on his hands and knees, then rose to his feet and began running, his mask off, his long blond hair tumbling from a bandana that had come loose on his head. That was the moment when Wyatt made a critical mistake. He took time to try to see the running man’s face and instead saw a hand with a rock in it swing from the corner of his vision. His eyebrow split against the bone, and he tumbled down the side of a ravine into a creek bed.

The man who had struck the blow followed Wyatt in his slide down to the water’s edge. He wore a painter’s cap pulled down tightly on his scalp and a long-sleeved black shirt and tan strap overalls. The hair on his chest resembled gold wires. Wyatt was standing in the creek, his feet freezing. He had another problem. Just before he went over the side of the ravine, he felt his ankle fold under him, like a thick tuber bent back on itself.

The man in the painter’s hat opened Wyatt’s six-inch clasp knife and held it out from his body, blade up. “I’m gonna cut off your sack, Jack,” he said, his voice echoing inside his mask.

Wyatt had dropped the e-tool at the top of the ravine. He picked up part of a cottonwood limb from the rocks. It felt soggy and cold and foolish in his hands, the leaves dripping into the stream.

Long ago, on the yard, Wyatt had learned that real badasses didn’t talk. Nor did they shave their heads and wear tats from the wrist to the armpit. Nor did they mob up with the Aryan Brotherhood. Genuine badasses curled 150 pounds, picked up five hundred on their shoulders, and did fifty push-ups while another guy sat on
their backs. Their bodies radiated lethality the way hog shit radiated stink. As an old con in Huntsville once told him, silence was your greatest strength. It forced your enemies into the theater of the mind, where their fears ate them alive.

“Then we’re gonna finish our date with your gash,” the man in overalls said.

Wyatt didn’t move. He could hear the water coursing around his feet and ankles and the cuffs of his jeans, the canopy swaying high above the ravine.

“Looks like you might have broke your ankle,” the man in tan overalls said.

Had he heard the voice behind that mask before? He couldn’t be sure. It was distorted, as though rising from the bottom of a stone well. Why wasn’t the man carrying a piece?

“Maybe we’ll call it a draw,” the man said. “Maybe you learned your lesson.”

Lesson about what?
Wyatt thought.

“You got nothing to say?”

He blinked inside the mask. He’s lost his guts. He’s fixing to step backward.

“Count your blessings, Tex,” the man said. “We’re going to allow you to walk out of here. The broad got off easy, too. If you ask me, she majored in ugly.”

When the man in strap overalls stepped backward, Wyatt whipped the cottonwood limb down on his forearm, knocking the knife from his hand onto the rocks. He swung again and missed, his ankle folding under him, a sickening pain traveling upward into his genitals and stomach. He threw himself forward and grabbed the man’s legs and tried to pull him down but lost his purchase in the stream and was barely able to hang on to the man’s right wrist.