An Absence of Light

She lived in a World War II-vintage house that backed up to one of the city’s bayous. When Arnette cashed in her twenty-five-year retirement from the federal government eight years ago, she looked for a long time before she found just the situation she wanted, a modest-to-low-income neighborhood, three houses in a row. It took every penny of her savings, but she bought all three of them and then proceeded to transform the yards of the three lots into something resembling a tropical nursery with the outside property lines of the two outside houses fortified with thick walls of rangy Asian bamboo. Although from the front each house appeared to have an entirely different owner, Arnette’s three properties actually formed a compound with each adjacent house accessible to the other through a common back yard from which the interior fences had been removed creating one large, wooded lawn that was not visible from the street. Aside from this slightly overgrown appearance, nothing distinguished Arnette’s houses from the others in the neighborhood since all of them tended toward a careless woodiness.

Within the perimeter of Arnette’s bamboo wall was a well-hidden security system that encircled the three lots. It was a very thorough piece of technology. The mailbox of each house was set into a rock pillar by each of the front gates and was accessible from the back side; one was completely covered with fig ivy, one was moss green with a lichen patina, and the other was almost hidden in Paradise bamboo.

Graver parked in front of the middle house, which was Arnette’s residence, and got out of the car. He knew the security lock on the front yard gate already would be opened for him, so he didn’t hesitate to open it and step inside the yard. The winding street, which closely followed the curves of the bayou for a dozen or more blocks, was shaded by large pecans and oaks and cypresses which seemed to be populated with every kind of bird that could inhabit a coastal, subtropical region, and their screeching and whistling and burbling filled the still, late morning air. As Graver made his way along the short brick path through the elephant ears and plantains and palmettos, he thought how closely Arnette had come to making the place seem like “a little bit of ‘Nam,” as she had said she wanted to do.

He opened the screen door of the long, screened-in room that ran the length of the front of the house just as the door to the house itself opened.

“Baby!” Arnette said softly, smiling at him, and Graver stepped to the front door to hug a wiry, smallish woman with large brown eyes who was still a few years away from sixty. Arnette wore her thick, brindled hair pulled back-though it rebelled and strayed in a spray of salt and pepper filaments-and woven in a single braid which she habitually wore over her left shoulder in the rather coy manner of a much younger woman. She was trim and had the face of a gypsy, with a strong narrow nose and white teeth. As always when she was at home, she was dressed in a high-necked Vietnamese silk blouse and pants, today of bright saffron.

“I couldn’t believe my ears,” she said, holding Graver’s arm in a kind of embrace as they entered the living room of the house. “It’s been close to a year, mister. Where the hell have you been?”

“Wandering in the sloughs of bureaucracy,” Graver said. “Lost in the Valley of Darkness.”

She laughed knowingly as they stepped into a large room as eccentric in appearance as Arnette herself. Of the three houses in a row, only hers had been completely renovated, its dominating feature being its most immediate one, a sprawling and spacious living room with heavy teak pillars holding up the ceiling where walls once had been. Much of the lighting came from a continuous cornice that circled the room near the ceiling, which had been raised to include the higher spaces of the attic and which provided an unusual soft glow throughout, as though the room existed in a perpetual dawn. This lighting was supplemented by table lamps sprinkled among comfortable armchairs and sofas and small incidental tables stacked with books. The furniture and the walls were decorated with fabrics and artifacts that Arnette had picked up in Southeast Asia and Latin America during her years of work there. The effect was as if they were entering the enormous tent of a nomadic tribe or a large marao, the communal grass hut of the Montagnards of South Vietnam.

Arnette was still smiling as she gestured for Graver to sit down and then took her place on one of the sofas. Above her head on the wall behind her was a display of wicked-looking blades with wooden handles, a goose-necked chuang and smaller siput and a variety of hook-tipped maks. They were not weapons, however, but farming tools used by the rice-farming Jeh tribe of Montagnards who lived in the murky Dak Poko valley where Arnette had spent several lifetimes when she was younger, during the early years of the Vietnam War.