Light of the World Read Free

I’ll buy you a Coca-Cola. They got showers there if you want one.”
    “Was that a bow you were putting in your camper? You owe me an answer.”
    “My name is Mr. Wyatt Dixon of Fort Davis, Texas. I’m a bullfighter and a handler of rough stock and a born-again Christian. What do you think of them apples? Come on down, girl. I ain’t gonna bite.”
    “I think you need to get out of here.”
    “This is the home of the brave and the land of the free, and God bless you for your exercise of your First Amendment rights. But I only pretended I didn’t hear what you said. Profanity does not behoove your gender. Know who said that? Thomas Jefferson did, yessiree-bobtail.”
    His teeth looked like they were cut out of whalebone. His whole body seemed wired with levels of energy and testicular power he could barely control. Even though his posture was relaxed, his knuckles were as hard-looking as ball bearings. “Are you deciding about my invite, or has the cat got your tongue?” he said.
    She wanted to answer him, but the words wouldn’t come. He removed his hat and drew a pocket comb through his silky red hair, tilting up his chin. “I’m a student of accents. You’re from somewhere down south. See you down the track, sweet thing. If I was you, I’d stay out of them woods. You cain’t ever tell what’s roaming around in there.”
    He let a semi carrying a huge piece of oil machinery pass, then got in his truck and drove away. She felt a rivulet of moisture leak from her sweatband and run down her cheek. A sour odor rose from under her arms.
    I N THE EARLY spring Alafair and my wife, Molly, and my old partner from NOPD, Clete Purcel, had returned to western Montana with plans to spend the summer on a ranch owned by a novelist and retired English professor whose name was Albert Hollister. Albert had built a three-story house of logs and quarried rock on a knoll overlooking a railed pasture to the north and another to the south. It was a fine home, rustic but splendid in concept, a bucolic citadel where Albert could continue to wage war against the intrusions of the Industrial Age. When his beloved Asian wife died, I suspected the house she had helped design rang with an emptiness that drove him almost mad.
    Albert installed Clete in a guest cabin located at the far end of the property, and the rest of us on the third floor of the house. From the balcony, we had a wonderful view of the wooded foothills that seemed to topple for miles and miles before they reached the Bitterroot Mountains, white and shining as bright as glaciers on the peaks and strung with mist at sunrise. Across from our balcony was a hillside dotted with larch and fir and pine trees and outcroppings of gray rock and traced with arroyos swollen with snowmelt and brown water and pine needles during the runoff in early April.
    On a shady slope behind the house, Albert had improvised a gun range where we popped big, fat coffee cans that he propped on sticks at the foot of a trail that had been used by Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce when they tried to outrun the United States Army. Before we would begin shooting, Albert would shout out “Fire in the well!” to warn any animals grazing or sleeping among the trees. He not only posted his own property, he infuriated hunters all over the county by chain-dragging logs across public roads in order to block vehicle access to U.S. Forest Service land during big-game season. I don’t know if I would call him a rabble-rouser, but I was convincedthat his historical antecedent was Samuel Adams and that ten like him could have a city in flames within twenty-four hours.
    The sun had set by the time Alafair returned to the house. She told me of her encounter with Wyatt Dixon.
    “Did you get his tag?” I asked.
    “There was mud on it. He said he was going to the casino.”
    “You didn’t see the bow?”
    “I already told you, Dave.”
    “I’m sorry, I wanted to get it straight. Let’s take a ride.”
    We drove