Light of the World (41 page)

“I have compulsions, Kyle,” I said. “I get something in my head, and it just won’t let go. With me, it’s your boots. I’d also like to know more about your history. You see, I know you’ve been up the road. You don’t like cops, you’re a wiseass, and you think you’re smarter than other people. That’s a profile of about ninety-eight percent of the people inside the system. My guess is you don’t like women, and the reason for that is they don’t like you.”

“What’s gonna make you happy?” Kyle said. “You want to get thrown out or beat up? There’s something about me that gives you a hard-on? You’re too old for it, man.”

It was none of the above. I was not sure what I felt toward Caspian and Love Younger and the employee named Kyle. They may have been the catalyst for the strange physiological and emotional change taking place inside me, but they were not the source. The change always started with a twitch under one eye, as though I were losing control of my facial muscles. Then I would experience a popping sound in my ears, one that was so severe I could not hear what others around me were saying. I would see their mouths opening and closing, but none of their words would be audible. I guess a therapist could call the syndrome a chemical assault on the brain, the same kind that supposedly occurs when a suicide goes off a roof or paints the ceiling by placing a shotgun under his chin.
In my case, the inside of my head would fill with a whirring noise that arrived in advance of a red-black rush of color and heat that I can compare only to gasoline and oil igniting inside a confined space.

When those things happened in the sequence I described, I became someone else. I did not simply want to punish my adversary, I wanted to kill him. It gets worse. I did not want to kill him with a weapon, I wanted to do it with my bare hands. I wanted to break the bones in his face with my fists, to knock his teeth down his throat, crush his thorax, and leave him gasping for breath as I rose splattered with blood from the damage I had inflicted upon him.

When I told others these things, I saw a level of sadness and pity and fear in their eyes that made me vow to never again discuss the succubus that has lived inside me most of my life.

Over Kyle’s shoulder, I saw Clete and Alafair walking toward us, Clete pausing only long enough to place his sandwich and beer cup on a picnic table. He had polished his shoes and put on a suit for the occasion. His eyes were clear, the gin roses gone from his complexion, his porkpie hat at a jaunty angle. When Clete was off the dirty boogie, he looked almost as youthful and handsome as when he and I walked a beat in the Quarter.

“How’s your corn dog hanging, Casp?” he said, swinging his arm through the air, slapping Caspian Younger between the shoulder blades with such force that he almost knocked him down.

“It’s under control here, Clete,” I said.

“I grok what you’re saying,” he replied, easing himself between me and Kyle, his eyes sweeping the crowd, not looking at any of us. “I grok this whole place. I grok the food. I grok the people.”

“You do what?” Kyle said.

Clete’s gaze was still on the crowd. “Is Dave right, Caspian? Is everybody copacetic here?” he said.

“If you’re looking for her, she’s inside,” Caspian replied, arching his back from the blow Clete had delivered. “Why don’t you go talk to her, then get the fuck out of here?”

“
Who’s
inside?” Clete said.

“You know who. She’s going to stay inside, too,” Caspian said.

“You got a trophy room in there, heads on the walls, stuffed cougars crouched on the beams, that kind of thing?” Clete said. “I get the feeling I’m standing in the middle of an ammo dump.”

Clete was like the baseball manager who comes out of the dugout, his hands stuffed in his back pockets, and starts yelling harmlessly at the umpire to take the heat off one of his players. In this instance, he had intervened in a situation on my behalf and perhaps saved me from getting hurt. But now he was testing the edges of the envelope.

“Go ahead,” Caspian said.

“Go ahead, what?” Clete said.

“Do what you’re thinking about and see what happens. I think you’re a lard ass and you’ve got a Vienna sausage for a penis. At least that’s what Felicity says. Yeah, you got it, she made her big confession. All sins are forgiven. I called a couple of guys in Tahoe. They say Sally Ducks kept you around for laughs and let you polish his car or clean his toilet, I don’t remember which. They say when Sally Dee met you, you were one cut above queer bait on the Strip.”

“Here’s the rest of the story: Sally Ducks got french-fried in his own grease, along with everybody else on his airplane,” Clete said.

Kyle removed a two-way phone from his pants pocket.

“Put it away,” Clete said. “Alafair and Dave and I are going back to our table. After I finish my beer and sandwich, we’ll motivate on down the road.”

“You’re gonna do
what
?” Caspian said.

“Motivate. It’s from Chuck Berry, asshole,” Alafair said. She pushed past Clete and pointed in Caspian’s face. “Say one more word like that to Clete, and I’m going to rip you apart, you little twerp.”

How do you pull the plug on a situation like this?

“I came here to speak with Mr. Younger, and I did,” I said. “That’s it. We’re gone.”

I started walking as though our departure were a done deal. Alafair and Clete hesitated, then caught up with me.

“You’re just going to walk away?” Clete said.

“I appreciate what you did back there,” I replied. “Now we’re going home.”

“What was all that about, anyway?” Alafair asked.

“One of the men who attacked Wyatt Dixon and his girlfriend stole his Tony Lama boots. He said they were cordovan, just like the ones this guy Kyle is wearing.”

“He’s wearing Lamas?” Clete asked.

“He said they were Justins. He wouldn’t show them to me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Clete said. “Hang loose.”

He turned around and headed straight for a tent where Kyle was standing by himself, lighting a cigarette, both hands cupped around the burning match. His eyes lifted above the flame as Clete came toward him. He flicked away the match and removed the cigarette from his lips and blew a stream of smoke into the air.

“Hey, I forgot to tell you something,” Clete said.

“I can’t wait to find out what that is.”

“You know what the Eleventh Commandment in New Orleans is?”

“Tell me, blimpo.”

“Don’t try to put the slide on the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide.”

“The who?”

“I knew you’d say that. Take off your boots.”

“Tell you what, I’ll let you shine them,” Kyle said. He lifted his cigarette to his mouth and took a puff. “While you’re down there, you can cop my stick.”

Clete stared at his reflection in Kyle’s sunglasses. The image was anatomically distorted, the head small, the body elephantine, the skin amber-tinted, like those of a miniaturized man trapped inside a beer bottle. “The sign out there says For Staff Only,” he said. “You want to pollute the place reserved for your fellow employees?” Clete pulled the cigarette from Kyle’s mouth and flipped it out on the grass. Then he dropped the flap on the front of the tent.

“Buddy, you just don’t learn,” Kyle said.

“Pull up your pants leg.”

“Enough with the boots. They’re
boots
. What the fuck is with you?”

“There’s no chance you and your buds tore the clothes off a woman up the Blackfoot and poured dirt in her mouth, is there? Right before two of you held her down and the third guy climbed on top of her?”

“You and your friend got a serious thinking disorder.” Kyle started out of the tent, but Clete stepped in his way.

“I want your boots.”

“If you haven’t noticed, there’s maybe five hundred people out there. A lot of them are my friends.”

“You’re right,” Clete said. “Forget everything I said, and let’s see if we can’t find another way.”

Clete cupped his left hand behind Kyle’s neck, almost as if consoling him, then drove his right fist into the man’s stomach, the blow sinking so deep that Kyle’s upper body jacked forward and his mouth formed into a cone, as though he wanted to speak but couldn’t, the blood draining from his cheeks.

Clete pushed him onto the ground, stepped on one of his ankles, and twisted the boot off his other foot. He looked at the label inside. “That’s what I call really low-rent. You steal the boots off a guy like Wyatt Dixon? He’s probably got hoof-and-mouth disease. Did you get his socks, too?”

He stuck the boot under his coat and walked out of the tent onto the fairway. Kyle stumbled after him, thrashing his way through the tent flap. He slipped on the grass and fell down again, gasping for air.

“The guy’s having a seizure!” Clete shouted, his face dilated with feigned alarm. “Get an ambulance!” He pushed his way through the crowd, not looking back.

“What happened?” I said.

“I’ve got one of his boots. It’s a Tony Lama,” he said.

“What did you do?” Alafair said.

“I think the guy fell down and got the wind knocked out of him. Don’t run. Everything is copacetic.” He glanced over his shoulder. “I take that back. Haul ass!”

S
UNDAY MORNING WYATT
Dixon was lying shirtless and in his socks in a hammock strung between two cottonwoods, down by the water’s edge, in front of his house on the Blackfoot. When he heard somebody clanging across the steel swing bridge, he didn’t know if the sound was real or if a junkyard was rolling around in his head. He picked up his pint of mint-flavored sloe gin and took a sip and gargled with it, then swallowed. With one eye closed, he watched a slender man with a jet-black mustache and flared sideburns approach him. The man was carrying a paper sack.

“Do you know some people say a law dog has a smell that don’t wash off?” Wyatt said. “They say it’s like trying to launder the stink out of shit.”

“You’re a hard man to find, Dixon.”

“Not if you come to the place I happen to be at. You can call me Mr. Dixon.”

“Your neighbors say you’ve been drunk for the last couple of days.”

“I cain’t necessarily say one way or the other. I have these empty spaces in my memory, kind of like holes in rat cheese. My neighbors are still giving out news bulletins on me, huh?”

“You remember me?”

“Jack Something. I know it’s not Jack Shit. Wait a minute, it’s
coming. You replaced Detective Pepper. The name is Jack Boyd. Or do you like Jack Shit better?”

The detective lifted his finger at the pint bottle balanced on Wyatt’s chest. “I always heard that stuff tasted like mouthwash with turpentine poured in it.”

“It does. That’s why I drink it.”

“I went by your girlfriend’s apartment. Bertha Phelps is still your girlfriend, right?”

“We’re in a holding pattern.”

The detective gazed at the river. It was wide and green and veined with froth from a beaver dam upstream. “You must have your women trained. I wish I knew the trick.”

“About what?”

“Training women. You use Viagra?”

Wyatt screwed the cap on his gin bottle and set it down in the grass. He looked at the detective with one eye. “I’m having a little trouble focusing on the direction of your conversation.”

“She accused the department of trying to put you back inside. From what she says, you’re an innocent man. In fact, you hung the moon. What’s your secret? That’s what I’m saying.”

“Secret about what?”

“Lighting up a woman’s inner self. You don’t ride them hard and put them away wet, I guess. I thought that was the cowboy way.”

Wyatt sat up in the hammock and rested his sock feet on the grass. “I don’t know as I care for the way you’re talking about Miss Bertha.”

The detective turned the paper bag upside down and let the contents slip loose and fall on the ground. “Ever see that before?”

“It’s a boot.”

“It’s a Tony Lama boot. You claimed the men who attacked you stole your Tony Lama boots. They were cordovan. So is this.”

“It ain’t mine.”

“How do you know?”

“It’s too small. I’ll show you.” Wyatt picked up the boot and felt for the label inside. “This one is a ten and a half. I wear a twelve.”

“Your feet don’t look like a twelve to me.”

Wyatt pointed to a pair of suede half-top boots in the grass. “Check them out.”

“You could be wearing those because you have an ACE bandage on your ankle.”

“I wear them because my feet are a size twelve. If that was my boot, I’d take it and ask you where the other one was at. But it ain’t mine.”

Wyatt’s face remained empty of expression. He looked at his nails, then up through the cottonwoods at the sky, seemingly uninterested in the origins of the boot. The detective handed him a photo lineup with six mug shots. “You ever see any of these men?”

Wyatt studied the photos. “I’ve seen this guy here in the middle.”

“Are you positive?”

“Absolutely.”

“Where?”

“At the fairgrounds or a powwow.”

“When?”

“Last summer. Up at the Indian rodeo on the rez.”

“That’s interesting, because he died in Deer Lodge ten years ago. I reread the report, Dixon. You said one of your attackers had long blond hair. He lost his mask, and his bandana came loose from his head. That’s when you saw his hair. You must have seen at least part of his face.”