He set the printouts on the breakfast table and pinched his eyes, a look of weariness if not soul sickness stealing into his face. I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t.
“What is it, Clete?” I said.
“You know the drill. The motherfuckers who start wars have never heard a shot fired in anger, but they wave the flag and make speeches at Arlington and run up the body count as high as they can. I hate them, every one of them.”
I knew Clete was no longer talking about events in the rain forests of Brazil or Venezuela. He was back in the Central Highlands, on the edge of a ville that stank of duck shit and stagnant water, the flame from the cannon of a Zippo track arching onto the roofs of the hooches, a mamasan pleading hysterically in a language he couldn’t understand.
“Finish the story, Clete,” I said.
His eyes came back on mine. “Rene Louviere quit his job with the oil company in protest. He went back to the States and joined a relief agency and returned to the ville the geologists had bombed. Guess what?”
“Don’t tell me.”
“A couple of Indians got wasted on mushrooms and chopped him into pieces.”
“How did Felicity Louviere meet her husband?”
“At a Mardi Gras ball. He probably didn’t tell her he got expelled from college for cheating. He’s also a degenerate gambler and had a hundred-grand credit line in Vegas and Atlantic City, until his father forced him into Gamblers Anonymous. Here’s the weird part: The guy supposedly has an incredible mind for figures. The reason he got comped in the casinos was because no matter how much he won, the house took it all back, plus the fillings in his teeth.”
“You think Younger’s people put the bug above Gretchen’s door?”
“They probably know she’s doing a documentary on Love Younger’s shale-oil projects in Canada. But...”
“But what?”
“Nobody cares about the damage these guys are doing, including the Canadians. Why spend money eavesdropping on us?”
“Maybe they’re hiding something that has little or nothing to do with the environment.”
“I don’t know what it is, and neither does Gretchen.”
“There’s another possibility, Clete. I just don’t like to think about it.”
“The guy up at the cave?”
“Asa Surrette is the name.”
“Dave, guys like this have a way of staying alive in our imagination long after they’re dead. Sometimes I still see Bed-check Charlie in the middle of the afternoon. He’s up on a rooftop, locking down on me through a scoped sight on a Russian rifle, just about to squeeze off a round. I feel like somebody is taking off my skin with a pair of pliers. What are the chances of Asa Surrette being the only survivor in a collision between a prison van and a gasoline truck?”
“What are the chances this guy could torture and kill people in his hometown and go undetected for two decades?”
Clete rubbed the back of his neck. “What do you know about him except he was active in his church?”
“He was an electrician and sometimes installed burglar alarms in people’s homes,” I replied.
He stared at me in the silence, his eyes lidless.
So far only two people gave any credence to the possibility that Asa Surrette had escaped from a gasoline-tanker explosion in West Kansas or that someone like him had stenciled the message on the cave wall. One was Alafair and the other was Wyatt Dixon, a man who proved so uncontrollable in custody that the state had tried to short-circuit his brain. I had told the sheriff not to listen to Dixon’s quasi-psychotic ravings. But I was wrong. Dixon was con-wise. He had information and levels of experience that other people couldn’t guess at. He was also the kind of guy you enlist in your cause if you want to win a revolution.
The discrepancy between the real world and how the world is reported by the media is enormous, and I’ve always believed this is why most newspeople drink too much. People like Wyatt Dixon understand how Frankenstein works and speak in metaphors that come out of their experience. Unfortunately, most of them have fried their SPAM, and their symbols and frame of reference don’t make much sense to the rest of us.
I grew up in the Deep South in an era when institutional cruelty was a given. I have never met one person in normal society who would admit knowledge of the cast-iron sweatboxes on Camp A in Angola Penitentiary. Nor have I met anyone who wasn’t shocked when I mentioned that there are more than a hundred convicts buried in the prison levee along the Mississippi River. Normal people will tell you they have never known a criminal, although they have sat in church pews next to slumlords, zoning board members on a pad, and defense contractors who have contributed to the death of thousands of human beings.
Here’s the biggest joke of alclass="underline" Wyatt Dixon was probably a genuine believer. He may not have believed in God, but no one could deny he hadn’t been on a first-name basis with the devil. Maybe that’s a pathetic cachet, but as Clete would say, who’s perfect?
Where do you go on a Sunday if you want to find a man like Wyatt Dixon? I saw Albert working in his flower bed and asked him. “There’s a holy roller meeting up on the rez this afternoon,” he replied. “You might try there.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“What do you want with Dixon?”
“Information.”
“The boy had a hard life. Don’t be too rough on him.”
“Dixon doesn’t impress me as a victim.”
“That’s because you don’t know anything about him. You loved your parents and your parents loved you, Dave. Dixon didn’t have that kind of luck.”
“You’re a good man, Albert.”
“That’s what you think,” he replied.
The holy roller meeting was held at a pavilion on the Flathead Indian Reservation not far from the Mission Mountains. It involved what people down south call dinner on the ground and sometimes devil in the bush. At five P.M. Clete and I drove in the Caddy up a long grade through wooded hills that were a deep green from the spring rains into a valley that rose higher and higher as the road progressed toward Flathead Lake. The sky was clear and blue, and fresh snow had fallen on the tops of the Missions during the night; in the sunlight, you could see the ice on the waterfalls melting. The mountains were so massive, the rock chain they formed against the sky so vast, that you lost perspective and the forests growing up the sides resembled green velvet rather than trees. It was one of those places that seemed to reduce discussions about theology to the level of folly.
The service was almost over when Clete parked the Caddy in a pasture lined with rows of cars and pickup trucks. Someone had extended a huge vinyl canopy from the pavilion over the grass, where at least a hundred people were seated in folding chairs, listening to a minister preach into a microphone. The sunlight looked like hammered bronze on the surface of the Jocko, the wind cutting serpentine lines through the fields, the canopy ballooning and popping overhead. The work-worn faces of the congregants were like those you would expect to see in Appalachia, the eyes burning with a strange intensity, and either awe or puzzlement or vulnerability, that reminded me of the paintings of Pieter Brueghel’s Flemish peasants.
The real show wasn’t the preacher. When it was time to give witness, he paused and held on to the sides of the podium, lifting his chin, sucking in his cheeks, his mouth puckered, as though he were teetering on the bow of a ship bursting through the waves. “Paul and Silas bound in jail!” he called out.