I had learned only one lesson in life: History does not correct itself in its own sequence. The moment of correction comes in ways we never anticipate. I believed then and I believe now that we drove into another dimension, one that was not spatial, one that had nothing to do with the banal world of rationality and cause and effect, one that was not imaginary but more real than the one where we measure our lives in teaspoons. In some ways, I had come to feel I was a self-deluded prisoner of The Song of Roland. I thought I’d bought into medieval notions of chivalry and cloaks rolled in blood and the clang of swords upon shields because I couldn’t deal with the savagery of my fellow man. Now I knew that was not the case. The story of Roncevaux was real, and so were the horns blowing in the canyons high up in the Pyrenees. It was the story that ennobled us and showed us we were more than we thought we could ever be. It was the poem that explained the nature of courage and turned the mystery of death into a heroic couplet. Ultimately, it was the poem that banished fear from the heart and transformed us from actors into participants.
There’s another way to put it. Sometimes your luck runs out and you have to accept that the life you planned was a dream written on water. Just south of Ludlow, where the striking miners and their wives and children were murdered by the Colorado state militia and Rockefeller’s gunmen, I saw the blue and red lights of several emergency vehicles parked diagonally on the highway, all of them pointed at us, like schooled-up sharks.
I swerved off the highway onto a dirt road, the back end of the Confederate fishtailing in a cloud of dust. I floored the accelerator and followed the road across the hardpan, past the site where the eleven children and two women had died in a pit under a burning tent. I climbed steadily into the high country, out of piñon trees and sage into spruce and grand fir and ponderosa and larch and lodgepole pine. In the rearview mirror, I could see at least three vehicles in pursuit. I worked the Luger from under the seat and set it on the dashboard. Rosita stared at me, her eyes filled with alarm.
The transition from the Southern Plateau into the mountains was dramatic. The road forked three times, and at each juncture I chose one road or the other arbitrarily. The peaks of the mountains were over eleven thousand feet, the fir trees shining with snowmelt in the sun, the boulders in their midst gray and smooth and stained with lichen in the shade. We climbed over a rise and descended an incline that gave us a brief view of a blue mountain higher than all the rest, so high the trees stopped at least two thousand feet below the peak.
Between the mountaintops was a ribbon of blue sky, and beyond it, on both sides of the mountains, rolling black clouds of a kind the filling station attendant had warned us about. The pistons in the Confederate were clattering like bones, the needle on the heat gauge trembling inside the red zone. I had no doubt we would soon blow a rod. Just as we started up the next incline, I saw the same twin-engine plane I had seen in Trinidad. It was making a wide turn, leveling out, coming back toward us for a flyover. I suspected it was a spotter plane working for the state police.
There was another fork ahead. I double-clutched the transmission and shifted into first and gave the engine all the gas it would take. We went around a curve into thicker timber, and I took my eyes off the dirt road to look quickly in the rearview mirror. The police cruisers below had temporarily lost sight of us and probably stopped to see which fork in the road we had taken. I looked back through the windshield and saw immediately in front of us a cliff extending into space with no guardrail. I swerved the car back on the road within two or three seconds of plunging at least a thousand feet to the forest below.
I had to fight to catch my breath. Rosita had not said a word. She had propped one hand against the dashboard, the other on the armrest. Steam was boiling off the hood. The Luger had clattered to the floor. “We should have gone over the edge,” she said.
“What?”
“I’d rather have it end that way.”
“We mustn’t think in those terms, Rosita. Please don’t say things like that again.”
“They’re going to get us. You know it. Don’t pretend.”
“Wrong. These bastards had better not catch up with us. If anyone pays a price, it will be them. We don’t punish ourselves for what others have done to us.”
“Stop lying. Our car is going to fall apart. Listen to the engine.”
“We’re never going to give up,” I said.
“That’s not the point. You’re not listening to me.”
She was right. I wasn’t listening to her, and I didn’t plan to, because I knew too well what was on her mind.
Suddenly, we were out of the trees and on a long, windswept, snow-streaked stretch of gray rock that overlooked a valley so far below that the fir trees looked one inch tall.
“Here,” she said.
“Here what?”
“We do it. I do it. I don’t care which of us does it. Give me the gun.”
I stopped the car and got out. I flung the Luger over the cliff. When I got back in the car, her eyes were shiny and wet. She started to open the door. I grabbed her by the arm. “Do you want to give in to these guys?”
“Someone left the door open on the electroshock room. I saw a woman being electrocuted. She had a rubber gag in her mouth. I’ll never forget her face.”
I popped the clutch and spun gravel off the tires and drove along the edge of the cliff, then turned onto a dirt track through the trees on the west side of the mountain. The descent was the steepest we’d attempted. Even in second gear, the brake bands were squealing, rocks as sharp as knives bouncing under the chassis, banging against the tie rods and oil pan, maybe slicing the tires.
We came out of the woods onto a corrugated road spanning two miles of swampy meadow that offered no cover and exposed us to the twin-engine plane turning out of the sun. The first of three police cruisers emerged from the woods, its red and blue emergency lights housed inside a Plexiglas dome of whirling mirrors on the roof. Two other police cruisers were bringing up the rear.
I can’t say I regretted throwing away the Luger. But I felt naked without it, the way you feel powerless in a dream, the way the tankers I saw at the Ardennes probably felt when they were trying to run in knee-deep snow while a German machine gunner locked down on them. There was no doubt in my mind this was it. The Confederate could not outrun the cruisers on a straight road. We would be arrested and separated, and Rosita would be at the mercy of the system.
Earlier I said I believed we had driven into another dimension. The events of the next few minutes would convince me that my perception was correct, but not because of any supernatural factor at work in our lives. I had acted on presumption about Roy Wiseheart, forgetting that presumption and arrogance are one and the same.
“What’s that plane doing?” Rosita said.
The twin-engine had made one pass overhead, wagging its wings, then turned and climbed in a maneuver known in the Great War as an Immelmann. The pilot dove toward us, as though his plane were sliding down a ski slope, barrel-rolling, or flying upside down, I wasn’t sure which. He zoomed over the treetops behind us and banked up into the ribbon of blue that was rapidly disappearing inside the advancing storm.
Grandfather had said the rich always returned to their own kind. He may have been right about other wealthy people, but he was wrong, as I had been, when it came to Roy Wiseheart.
I had the accelerator on the floor. If we blew the engine, we blew the engine. Maybe the drivers of the police cars were distracted by the plane, or perhaps they had incurred their own mechanical troubles, but for whatever reason, they were dropping farther and farther behind, just as a great shadow began to spread across the valley. Rosita was kneeling on the seat and looking through the back window. For just a second, in my mind’s eye, I thought of Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow speeding down a Texas road with bullets flying past their heads.
No one shot at us. They never go
t the chance. I heard Rosita scream. It sounded like the screech I had heard inside the Confederate when I fired Grandfather’s revolver through the back window.
“What is it?” I said.
“He’s going to kill us!” she said.
He came in low over the road, as though strafing a convoy of Japanese infantry. He roared right over the top of the Confederate, buffeting it the way the slap of a wave would. I thought he would pull up. Maybe that was what he intended to do. But in my relationship with Roy, I never saw him act without forethought, and I never saw him fail when it came to carrying out his intentions. His wheels were up, his speed faster than any safe landing would allow. The plane went over us, blocking out the sky, then belly-landed, sliding like a plow on the road, the propellers locking and then crumpling against the wings.
All the light had gone out of the sky. The meadows were dark and sodden, the water ponds in the grass flanged with ice. The sparks flying from under the plane’s fuselage resembled the bright orange drip from a welder’s torch. The explosion was not loud, more like a whoosh of heat, like metal rising into the air and collapsing back on itself, like a flash of yellow and red on the snow, like a Christmas log bursting alight.
None of the police cruisers was touched. But they weren’t going anywhere. The meadows, frozen or not, were nothing short of a bog. As we drove into the woods on the far side of the valley, I saw the burning plane and the cruisers and the policemen grow smaller and smaller in my rearview mirror, like images frozen in time on an incandescent triptych dissolving inside its own heat.
Epilogue
ROY’S FIERY DEATH was described as a tragedy in newspapers all over the United States. The word was repeated so often that people probably believed it. One of the police officers added to Roy’s mystique by stating he could have escaped from the cockpit but had remained in the seat and, in the officer’s words, “melted like a candle.”
I believe Roy did not consider his life or his death a tragedy. I like to think he had more humility than that. If he had any last thoughts, I suspected they were about his father, a man I considered one of the most worthless human beings on the planet. Roy wanted to be a hero, in the best possible sense. It’s not a bad ambition. Regardless, I decided to turn loose of him and not look back on our relationship and not think of it in terms of good or bad. I concluded that he made a conscious choice to rejoin his squadron commander over the South Pacific and undo his mistake in judgment. I prayed that in some fashion, Roy finally found peace, if that was what he ever sought.
I may have been finished with Roy, but Roy was not finished with me. As I had learned from Bonnie and Clyde, the dead lay strong claim on the quick and do not easily take leave of the earth. After the authorities were made to look ridiculous by the press, we returned to Houston and found a package on the dining room table. There was no return address. The postmark was Clayton, New Mexico.
Sorry I couldn’t give you this in person. These items came from a storage cabinet at one of my father’s warehouses in East Texas. I don’t know if he’s aware of their existence. I doubt he is. I also doubt he cares. I thought you might like them.
You’ll always be an example to me. Give them heck, Weldon.
Your bud,
The Wayfaring Stranger
Inside the box were a wedding ring, my father’s wallet, a pencil stub, my dollar watch with the broken spring, a coin purse with two nickels and a dime and one penny in it, and an unstamped postcard addressed to Mrs. Emma Jean Holland. My father was a laconic man and never given to an excess of words or sentiment. The message was not only simple but unsigned. It read: I’ve done right well and have saved some money. I’m getting my drag-up check this Friday and I should be home by Sunday. Buy some peach ice cream. We’re going to be a family again. And tell that boy of mine I love him.
Linda Gail and Hershel divorced, and six months later, she married Jerry Fallon. One year later, she divorced Fallon and was nominated for best supporting actress. She remarried two or three times after that. One of her husbands was an aviator; another had been an officer with the French Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu; another was a country-club tennis champion and collector of race cars, one of which flipped on a test track and broke his neck.
There were lovers, too, evidently many of them. None of them ever spoke negatively of her to the media or anyone else. If they paid dues for their dalliance, none of them seemed to mind. To my knowledge, she never returned to Texas or Louisiana. She kept her looks and had a stunning career and called Hershel Pine from Mexico City the night before she died in 1968 of an overdose of barbiturates. Hershel never discussed the content of their conversation other than to say, “She was a good woman.”
At the Ardennes, Hershel had told me he sweated uncontrollably, even in freezing weather, when a calamity was about to occur, such as the German breakout at the Bulge. I didn’t believe him about the Germans, not until the King Tigers were crashing down on top of us. He also told me he could smell money, particularly untapped oil and natural gas, but he’d struck out when we brought in those two dusters outside New Roads, Louisiana. Even though we held on to the mineral leases, I had given up on them. Hershel never did. We held on to them for over two decades, then went back to Pointe Coupee Parish with new technology and drilled down twenty-one thousand feet. The land was owned by poor black sweet-potato farmers for whom seven to ten acres was a plantation. The reserve we punched into was one of the biggest postwar strikes in the country. Even after years of production, the dome contains an estimated seven billion barrels of oil. The first royalty checks paid to the sweet-potato farmers, checks that would come on a quarterly basis, were in excess of two hundred thousand dollars.
These events all took place in another era. In spite of the war, the country was still innocent about its potential, in the way that a child who does not know his strength can be both innocent and destructive. The dance palladia and the roller rinks like the one where Grandfather fell down were filled with young people for whom the season was eternal. From the Jersey Shore to Pacific Palisades Park, you could hear orchestra music that was always collective in nature, a celebration of ourselves and the victory over nationalistic forces that would have made the world a slave camp. A western sunset that was the color of a flamingo’s wings did not signify an ending but a beginning, an invitation to share in the glorious promise that awaited the young and the glad of heart. Highway 66, the Painted Desert, and Hollywood belonged to all of us. If we doubted that paradisiacal vision of ourselves, the radio reassured us nightly that we were part of an extended community where everyone lived next door to movie stars.
I heard Roy’s body was burned into a carbon shell and the remnants put into an urn and scattered on the water off Catalina Island by Jerry Fallon. Linda Gail’s coffin was misplaced and lost forever in a huge necropolis in the center of Mexico City. On a visit to Santa Monica, Rosita and I bought a dozen red roses, Linda Gail’s favorite flower, and walked out on the pier at sunset and threw them into a wave. I always hoped Roy knew who they were from.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank my editor, Sarah Knight, and my copy editor, E. Beth Thomas, for their invaluable help on this manuscript. I would also like to thank my publishers, Carolyn Reidy and Jonathan Karp, and my editors at Pocket Books, Louise Burke and Abby Zidle, and all the other fine people in the Simon & Schuster family for the great contribution they have made to my writing career.
Turn the page to read an excerpt from
Light of the World
A Dave Robicheaux novel from “America’s best novelist” (The Denver Post),
James Lee Burke
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Chapter
1
I WAS NEVER GOOD at solving mysteries. I don’t mean the kind cops solve or the ones you read about in novels or
watch on television or on a movie screen. I’m not talking about the mystery of Creation, either, or the unseen presences that reside perhaps just the other side of the physical world. I’m talking about evil, without capitalization but evil all the same, the kind whose origins sociologists and psychiatrists have trouble explaining.
Police officers keep secrets, not unlike soldiers who return from foreign battlefields with a syndrome that survivors of the Great War called the thousand-yard stare. I believe that the account of the apple taken from the forbidden tree is a metaphorical warning about looking too deeply into the darker potential of the human soul. The photographs of the inmates at Bergen-Belsen or Andersonville Prison or the bodies in the ditch at My Lai disturb us in a singular fashion because those instances of egregious human cruelty were committed for the most part by baptized Christians. At some point we close the book containing photographs of this kind and put it away and convince ourselves that the events were an aberration, the consequence of leaving soldiers too long in the field or letting a handful of misanthropes take control of a bureaucracy. It is not in our interest to extrapolate a larger meaning.
Hitler, Nero, Ted Bundy, the Bitch of Buchenwald? Their deeds are not ours.
But if these individuals are not like us, if they do not descend from the same gene pool and have the same DNA, then who were they and what turned them into monsters?
Every homicide cop lives with images he cannot rinse from his dreams; every cop who has handled investigations into child abuse has seen a side of his fellow man he never discusses with anyone, not his wife, not his colleagues, not his confessor or his bartender. There are certain burdens you do not visit on people of goodwill.
When I was in plainclothes at the NOPD, I used to deal with problems such as these in a saloon on Magazine Street, not far from the old Irish Channel. With its brass-railed bar and felt-covered bouree tables and wood-bladed fans, it became my secular church where the Louisiana of my youth, the green-gold, mossy, oak-shaded world of Bayou Teche, was only one drink away. I would start with four fingers of Jack in a thick mug, with a sweating Budweiser back, and by midnight I would be alone at the end of the bar, armed, drunk, and hunched over my glass, morally and psychologically insane.