Light of the World Read Free Page B

a veiled threat about seeing her down the track. Don’t ever come near us again, Mr. Dixon.”
    His eyes wandered over my face. His mouth was down-hooked at the corners, his skin taut as pig hide, the dimple in his chin clean-shaven and shiny, perhaps with aftershave. He glanced through the front window at a sheriff’s cruiser pulling into the parking lot. The moral vacuity of his profile reminded me of a shark’s when it passes close to the glass in an aquarium.
    “Did you hear me?” I said.
    “That 911 deputy ain’t gonna find nothing in my truck, ’cause there ain’t nothing to find,” he said. “You asked if I was inside. I got my head lit up with amounts of electricity that make you glad for the rubber gag they put in your mouth. Before you get your nose too high in the air, Mr. Robicheaux, your daughter asked me if that ‘fucking arrow’ was mine. She talked to me like I was white trash.”
    He sat back down and began eating his sandwich again, swallowing it in large pieces without chewing or drinking from his soda, his expression reconfiguring, like that of a man who could not decide who he was.
    I should have walked away. Maybe he wasn’t totally to blame. Maybe Alafair had indeed spoken down to him. Regardless, he had tried to frighten her, and there are some things a father can’t let slide. I touched him on the shoulder, on the pattern of white stars sewn onto the fabric. “You’re not a victim, partner,” I said. “I’m going to pull your jacket and see what you’ve been up to. I hope you’ve been on the square with us, Mr. Dixon.”
    He didn’t turn around, but I could see the rigidity in his back and the blood rising in his neck like the red fluid in a thermometer.

T HE ALLURE OF Montana is like a commitment to a narcotic; you can never use it up or get enough of it. Its wilderness areas probably resemble the earth on the first day of creation. For me it was also a carousel, one whose song and light show never ended. The morning after Alafair’s confrontation with Wyatt Dixon, we had rain, then blowing snow inside the sunshine, then sleeting snow and rain, and sunshine again and green pastures and flowers blooming in the gardens and a rainbow that arched across the mountains. All of this before nine A.M.
    I walked down through the pasture, past Albert’s four-stall barn, to the cabin made of split logs where Clete Purcel was staying. The cabin had been built next to a streambed shaded by cottonwoods and a solitary birch tree. The streambed carried water only in the spring and was dry and sandy the rest of the year, crisscrossed by the tracks of deer and wild turkeys and sometimes the long-footed imprints of snowshoe rabbits.
    Clete’s hip waders were hanging upside down from the gallery roof, rainwater slipping down their rubbery surfaces; his fly and spinning rods were propped against the gallery railing, the lines pulled tightly through the eyelets and doubled back along the length of the rods, the hooks on the lures notched into the cork handles. He had washed his canvas creel and fishnet in a bucket and had hungthem and his canvas fly vest on pegs that protruded from the log wall. His restored maroon Cadillac convertible was parked behind the cabin, a tarp draped over its starched white top, the tarp speckled with the droppings of ravens and magpies.
    Through the window, I could see him eating at the breakfast table, his massive upper body hunched over his food, the grate on the woodstove behind him slitted with fire. Before I could knock, he waved me in.
    If space aliens ever wanted to take over the planet and wipe out the human race, they simply needed to convince the rest of us to eat the same breakfast that Clete Purcel did. With variations depending on the greasy spoon, he daily shoveled down the pipe a waffle or three pancakes soaked in syrup, or four eggs fried in butter, with toast, grits, and a bowl of milk gravy on the side; a pork chop or breakfast steak or a plate of ham