Light of the World (31 page)

“Am I bothering you?” I asked.

He was sitting at his desk, his reading glasses on, a dozen grade sheets spread before him. “No, come in, Dave,” he said, waving me in.

“What are you working on?”

“The general pain in the ass that made me quit teaching—fooling with grades and all that nonsense.”

“You’re retired. Why are you worrying about student grades now?”

“People I gave an incomplete to years ago finally end up doing the work and want credit for the course.”

I had known some of Albert’s students. They had told me about his method of teaching: He didn’t have one. His classes were chaos. Often he conducted them in a saloon or, if the weather was nice, on the lawn. He didn’t check the roll. He didn’t give grades for assignments. As a rule, he knew the students only by their first names. He told them to forget everything they had ever learned about literature and write about what they knew and remember that in art, there were no rules. The lowest grade he ever gave anyone who completed his creative writing workshop was a B. The only text he ever used was John Neihardt’s
Black Elk Speaks
. The only critic he ever respected was Wallace Stegner, not because Stegner was a scholar at Stanford but because he had been a Wobbly.

“Pack rats got into my file drawer. These grade sheets are useless,” he said. “I can’t find this guy’s name.”

I didn’t want to ask him how he never noticed that pack rats were living in his office. “What are you going to do?” I said.

“Well, I can’t give him an A because he turned the work in eleven years later. But he probably deserves at least a B, so that’s what he’s going to get.”

“I’m sorry for setting a fire in the cave,” I said.

“That’s all right. Your heart was in the right place. I just worry about you sometimes.”

Don’t buy into Albert’s doodah and get into it with him,
I thought.

“There’s a lesson you never learned,” he said. “Do you remember the last line of dialogue Harry Morgan speaks in
To Have and Have Not
?”

“Not offhand.”

“Harry is shot up real bad on his boat and dying and can hardly talk, and he says, ‘No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.’ ”

“You’re saying I’m a loner?”

“Inside you are. You have people around you, and they mean a lot to you, but inside you’re always by yourself.”

“You’ve been a loner since you were a kid,” I said.

“I’ve been alone since Opal died, but not before. Don’t ever make yourself alone, Dave. That’s the big lesson. When you start to see evil forces at work in the world, you give them power they don’t have.”

I was sitting in a leather swivel chair by his bookcases. I looked at my shoes and wasn’t sure what I should say. Albert had chain-ganged on the hard road in Florida. I didn’t want to talk down to him. But he made me mad. “I saw GIs who had been hanged in trees and skinned alive. I had a marine friend from Georgia, a sergeant, who went crazy with remorse over what he saw some other guys do to a Vietnamese girl in a ville they trashed. You want to know what they did?”

“No, I don’t.”

I told him anyway and saw him swallow and his eyes recede with a look of sorrow that would not go away easily. “You know that story to be true?” he asked.

“The guy who told it to me killed himself. Evil isn’t an abstraction,” I said.

“None of those things would have happened if we hadn’t taken on the neocolonial policies of the French and the British.”

“This isn’t politics. Asa Surrette is out there. He’s been on your property, and he tried to kill Alafair and Gretchen. How did he survive a head-on crash between a prison van and a tanker truck filled with gasoline?”

He shook his head. “I’m old, and I live by myself in a house where I hear my wife’s voice talking to me. Sometimes I think it’s my imagination,
sometimes not. Sometimes I want to unlock my gun cabinet and join her. I don’t believe in the devil, and I don’t believe in Asa Surrette. The evil in our lives comes from men’s greed, and the manifestation of that greed is in the corporations that cause the wars.”

I loved Albert and felt bad for him. I hadn’t meant to hurt him or remind him of the loss of his wife or call up the feelings of loneliness and mortality that beset all of us when we live longer than perhaps we should. A window was open, and the wind was blowing strands of his white hair on his forehead. The evening was warm and the trees on the hillside were glowing in the sunset, and there was something about the moment that made me think of traditional America and lighted houses throughout the land and family people whose only goal was to lead good lives and be with one another. As I looked at Albert’s broad face and wide-set eyes and purposeful gaze, I thought of the ragtag army of Anglo-Scotch soldiers who formed up at Breed’s Hill outside Boston in 1775. I realized there was someone else Albert resembled, a man who was a collector of historical firearms and who represented everything Albert despised. I kept my opinion to myself and did not tell Albert how much he reminded me of Love Younger.

T
HE WEST END
of Broadway in Missoula was a study in contradictions. The vista was lovely. The mountains were mauve and purple in the sunset, the river wide and braided over the rocks and rimmed along the banks with willows and cottonwoods. The street was lined on either side with bars, liquor stores, casinos, and run-down independent motels. Saturday-night knifings were not unusual; neither were sexual assaults. If you wanted to get falling-down drunk, laid and dosed with the clap, shanked or shot or just beat up, arrested, and jailed, this was the place to do it.

Tony Zappa drove around to the side of a motel by the river’s edge and parked in a handicap zone not far from a green door with a tin numeral nailed on it. He took off his gloves and looked up and down the street at the bars and casinos that had turned on their neon signs, then gazed through the window of Gretchen’s pickup
at the rolled leather interior and the polished woodwork and high-tech gauges on the dashboard. He looked at the heavy tread on the tires and the chrome on the radiator and the moon hubcaps and the Frenched headlights and the waxed three-layer black paint job, all of which were high-end modifications that cost high-end money.

He tapped his gloves in his palm and went into the office. The clerk was a kid with zits on his forehead and thin arms wrapped with tattoos of snakes and skulls and bleeding daggers. He was glued to the screen of his laptop. On it, a naked man and woman were in full-body inverted congress.

“You know the broad in room nine?” Zappa said.

“She’s a guest.”

“I know she’s a guest. What’s her story?”

“How the fuck should I know?” the clerk replied.

“I can see this is a class joint, the kind that protects its guests’ privacy. You accept food stamps?”

“I can give you a break on a coupon from
Screw
magazine,” the clerk said. “You got to provide your own sheets, though.”

“You’re a funny guy. That boner fills out your pants nicely. Enjoy your movie.” Zappa left the office and got ten steps down the sidewalk, then turned around and went back. “I’m gonna ask you this once, and I don’t want a smart-ass answer. Is the girl in room nine by herself?”

“She came in by herself.”

“That’s not what I asked you.”

“It’s a single. On Sunday nights, it’s twenty dollars. For two people, it’s thirty dollars. She paid twenty dollars.”

“Are you retarded? Answer my question. You see anybody else hanging around? A cowboy, maybe?”

“We have three kinds of guests here: shitkickers, drunk Indians, and street people. The street people pool their money and send one person in, usually a woman. The Indians drink on the balcony and puke over the rail on the cars down below. Most of the street people were kicked out of detox.”

“I didn’t ask for all that information. Did you see a shitkicker in her room? A guy with a white straw hat?”

“No.”

“If you’re lying to me, I’ll be back.”

“Go fuck yourself, man.”

“Tell you what. I’ll be back whether you’re lying or not.”

Zappa went back down the sidewalk to room nine and twisted the doorknob. The door swung back slowly across the carpet. He could hear the shower running in the background. “All right if I come in?” he said, his eyes searching the room. “Can you hear me? I’m coming inside. Don’t come out without a towel around you.” The bathroom door was ajar, and the water was drumming loudly on the tin sides of the stall. “Hey, I’m inside now. I’m closing the door. I got a little weed. You mind?”

No answer.

He turned in a circle, letting his eyes adjust to the poor light and the shadows the neon sign outside created through the curtains. There was nobody else in the room. He pulled a Ziploc bag from his coat and sat down in a chair by the bed and rolled a joint and lit it, ignoring the
NO SMOKING
sign above the doorway. He stood up and faced the bathroom, holding down the hit, releasing it incrementally, feeling a great calm take hold in his chest for the first time that day. “What are you doing in there?”

He heard the outside door open behind him. Before he could turn around, an arm that felt as hard as angle iron clenched around his throat and squeezed his windpipe shut and almost snapped his head from his shoulders.

“Howdy-doody,” Wyatt Dixon said into his ear. “Let’s talk about what you boys done to my friend Miss Bertha. It’s a pleasure to get together with you.”

G
RETCHEN WAS DRESSED
and blotting her hair with a towel when she came out of the bathroom. Tony Zappa was sitting very still in a chair, his hands duct-taped behind him, a rubber ball wedged and taped inside his mouth. His eyes were bulging, the tubes of muscle in his triceps as taut as rope. She spread the towel on top of the bedcover before she sat on it.

“We’re going to keep it simple,” she said. “You got stung. We win, you lose. Maybe you can walk out of here. Maybe not. That depends on what Wyatt decides and how much you cooperate. I’ll be up-front with you. When I was a little girl, I knew several guys like you. I see them in my dreams and sometimes in the middle of the day. I’d like to kill them, but I can’t do that because they’re already dead. That makes you the surrogate, Tony. You know what the word ‘surrogate’ means?”

He kept his eyes on hers, not moving, the rubber ball wet in his mouth.

She pulled on a pair of latex gloves. “I’m going to take the ball out of your mouth. You’re going to talk in a normal voice and answer our questions. You’ve got no parachute, no cavalry, no Love Younger to back you up. You thought Compton was a bad gig? Those were your salad days, pal.” She pulled the ball from his mouth and set it on the carpet and wiped her glove with a paper napkin. “Don’t speak until I tell you,” she said. “I know everything there is to know about you. You were in juvie and Atascadero and Lompoc. You went down once for distribution and sale to minors and once for theft from the mails. In juvie, you were repeatedly sodomized. Maybe it’s not your fault you’re a bucket of shit. Believe it or not, we’re probably the best friends you’ll ever have.”

He started to speak. Dixon slapped him across the side of the head, so hard his eyes crossed and the imprint of the blow glowed on his skin. Gretchen raised her hand for Dixon to stop. “He’s all right,” she said.

“Leave him with me, Miss Gretchen.”

“No, no, Tony wants to cooperate. He’s been around the block a few times and isn’t going to take somebody else’s weight. Right, Tony? Whatever you did, you were ordered to do. In a way you’re a soldier, just like mobbed-up guys are. Here’s the
problemo
with that. From everything Wyatt and I have been able to figure out, your attack on him and his friend was meant to provoke him, not scare him off, because you know a guy like Wyatt doesn’t rattle or scare off.”

“It wasn’t me,” Zappa said.

“Wyatt saw the red spider on your hand.”

“Years ago kids all over East Los wore those,” Zappa said. “Love Younger hires ex-felons and gives them a second chance. I know at least two other guys working for him who were Arañas.”

“How’d you get bruised up?” she said.

“Fell off a ladder.”

“Look at me,” she said.

“What do you think I’m doing? Where else am I gonna look?”

“When is the last time you saw Asa Surrette?”

“Who?”

“You were wired up earlier,” she said. “Why would a guy who did time in Lompoc and Atascadero be wired up in a yuppie bar on Sunday evening?”

“Because I’m not good with women. Because you got big knockers. Because you look like you could rip the ass out of an elephant. I get nervous about those things.”

She pulled off her latex gloves and dropped them on the floor. “Bill Pepper drugged and sexually tortured me.”

“I don’t know anybody by that name.”

“I believe you. You know why?”

“Because I’m telling the truth?”

“No, because you blinked after you spoke.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“When I asked you the previous questions, you widened your eyes so you wouldn’t blink. That means you were lying, Tony,” she said. “We’re back to square one. You remember what square one was, don’t you? On square one, you were the rapist who attacked Wyatt’s friend. For me, that makes you the kind of guy who deserves anything that happens to him. I don’t want you to misunderstand. I’m not trying to scare you. I just want you to know what your victims feel about you and what they’re capable of doing when they get the chance. Am I getting through?”

“No,” he said.

“There was this mobbed-up guy named Bix Golightly who forced his cock into the mouth of a six-year-old girl on her birthday and told her he’d kill her if she ever told her mother. The little girl grew
up and found this guy in New Orleans sitting behind the wheel of his van. She parked one in his forehead, one in the middle of his face, and one in his mouth. It was pretty messy. See, the shooter was using twenty-two hollow-points. They don’t exit, they bounce around inside the skull. As I recall, Bix Golightly’s brains were running out his nose.”

Zappa’s lips were gray, his elongated eyes sweeping around the room, as though an answer to his situation lay inside the shadows.