A Private Cathedral

Chapter Ten

Clete drove his rental down to the Keys. On the western horizon, trapped under a black lid of storm clouds, was an eye-watering band of blue brilliance and a pinkish-yellow sun that the rain could not diminish and the Gulf of Mexico could not sink. He opened his windows when he drove across Seven Mile Bridge, the salty denseness of the wind like an immersion into a warm pool that could magically restore his youth. For just a moment he felt a sense of comfort so great that he dozed off and hit a rumble strip that jarred his teeth.

He righted the steering wheel and glanced down through the steel grid and saw a patch of color in the water that looked exactly like india ink floating under the surface. He wondered if he was dreaming or witnessing a sign. By the time he reached Key West, the sun was only a spark on the horizon, the moon was rising, and Duval Street was filled with music and celebrants who were innocently happy and hilariously drunk, forming conga lines on the curbs, perhaps certain that death would pass them by or perhaps accepting it for what it was.

In Clete’s mind, for good or bad, Key West had always been a hole in the dimension that took him back to his childhood in old New Orleans. Rick’s Bar was a two-story white frame building with a big veranda and numerous windows and doors, similar to the nineteenth-century residences in the Irish Channel. Clete went inside, sat at the bar, and ordered a vodka Collins and two dozen oysters on the half shell.

The stage was small and bare and framed with different-colored lightbulbs. Johnny Shondell came out from behind a curtain with his Super Jumbo Gibson slung from his shoulder, the belly and neck pointed down. Hardly anyone took notice of him. He was grinning as he bent to the microphone and adjusted it to his height. A thick dark blue cloud of smoke sagged from the ceiling. Clete took a long swallow from his glass, letting the crushed ice and cherries and orange slices and the coldness of the vodka have their way.

Johnny looked up and momentarily seemed to recognize him, then dropped his gaze and began tuning his guitar. The bartender set a napkin and a tiny fork in front of Clete, then went back to the bin and opened an oyster and slid it down the bar trailing ice. “Curbside service,” he said. “I shuck ’em, you chuck ’em.”

“How’s the kid doing with your customers?” Clete asked.

The bartender’s arms were huge and tanned and wrapped with black hair. “It’s Key West. People see UFOs under the water. How do you compete with an act like that?”

Johnny made a chord up on the neck of his Gibson, ran his thumb over the strings, then went into Doc Watson’s “Freight Train Boogie.” The speed of his fingers was stunning. Clete once saw Robbie Robertson and Eric Clapton perform together: It was the only time he had seen anyone faster and more graceful than Johnny. Four other musicians joined Johnny, and he played and sang six traditional numbers in a row. The applause was more courteous than passionate. A man shouted for an Elvis song as though Johnny were a reenactor. Johnny sang “Heartbreak Hotel,” then left the stage and ordered a drink at the end of the bar.

Clete picked up his glass and moved down the bar and sat on the stool next to him. “I really dug your songs,” he said.

Johnny was shaking his head negatively before Clete could continue. “We shouldn’t be talking, Mr. Clete.”

“Eddy Firpo told you I was coming?”

“He’s still in shock from what you did to his house in Bay St. Louis.”

Clete signaled the bartender for another Collins. “Dave Robicheaux and I are trying to do you a solid, kid. How about getting with the program?”

Johnny looked at Clete’s left arm. “You’re out of the sling, huh?”

“Forget about me. You got a lot of talent. You can go somewhere.”

“I’m heading out to Los Angeles with Eddy. I know you don’t like Eddy, but he’s on my side. Now lay off us.”

“Eddy Firpo is not a person. He’s a disease. Time to take off the blinders. You going to see Isolde in L.A.?”

Johnny looked into his drink. “That’s all over.”

“I heard y’all sing together. You remind me of Dale and Grace. Maybe even better.”

“You got to leave this alone, Mr. Clete.”

“If Adonis Balangie or your uncle is behind this, we can do something about it,” Clete said. “This isn’t 1861.”

Johnny looked over his shoulder and scanned the street. “Have you talked to Isolde or seen her?”

“No,” Clete said.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Start telling the truth. Stop covering up for greaseballs. What the hell is the matter with you?”

“Nobody would believe it.”

“I believe it. I look like I just got off the boat with a spear in my hand and a bone in my nose?”

“You said it’s not 1861. You got that right.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Try four hundred years earlier.”

Clete finished his first drink and started on the fresh one. He leaned closer to Johnny. “Here’s the truth about the Mob. Most of them skipped toilet training. They smell like salami and hair tonic and BO. They were either lazy or too stupid to hold honest jobs, so they terrorized their fellow immigrants and thought up a bunch of crap about burning pictures of their patron saints and slicing their hands and smearing blood on each other and swearing themselves to secrecy and calling themselves men of honor. You think Adonis Balangie does shit like that? He wouldn’t let those guys lick his toilet.”

“I got to get back to work.”

“I’m not good with words,” Clete said. “Hey, kid, this is what it is. You make other people see the glass rings on the bar, the honky-tonk angels, Dallas at night from a DC-9. Don’t let these bums destroy your life.”

Johnny looked at Clete, then at Clete’s drink, then at Clete again. “You talk pretty good for a guy who—”

“A guy who what?”

“Nothing.”

“A guy who drinks too much? You’re right. My head glows in the dark. At night I don’t have to use a reading lamp,” Clete said. “After you get through here, let’s grab a steak. I knew Louis Prima and Sam Butera when they played at Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon. My favorite lyric from Louis was ‘I’ll be standing on the corner plastered when they bring your body by.’ ”

“No more sermons, Mr. Clete.”

“Me?” Clete said.

At two-fifteen A.M. Clete picked up Johnny Shondell at the curb. They ate at an all-night diner and drove down to Johnny’s motel on the southern tip of the island. Clete had put away half of a large bottle of Champale while he drove, the cold bottle swishing between his thighs. His arm ached from the knife wound that had not yet healed; his eyelids felt like lead, and his vision was starting to go out of focus. He looked at Johnny’s profile in the glow of the dash and wanted to speak but couldn’t remember what he’d planned to say.

“You’re not going to drive back to Lauderdale tonight, are you?” Johnny said, getting out of the car.

“I’ll find a rest stop,” Clete said.

“You don’t want to get arrested in Key West, Mr. Clete.” Johnny was leaning down, the car door still open, the breeze puffing his shirt on his wide shoulders. There was an unnatural shine in his eyes. “I get weirded out sometimes at night. You know that expression ‘the night has a thousand eyes’? That’s the way I feel.”

“We’ll sit on the dock,” Clete said.

The motel had been built on the southernmost tip of the key. The water was dark green under the moon, a small boat bumping against a piling beneath the dock. Johnny and Clete sat down in a pair of recliners. Clete felt two hundred years old. He offered the Champale bottle to Johnny. “No, thanks,” Johnny said.

“You’re not big on alcohol?”

“Not much.”

“It’s better if a guy can do without it.”

“So why don’t you?” Johnny said.

“I never think about it. That’s what happens when you’re on the juice most of your life. You don’t think about it.”

Johnny sniffed and pulled his cuffs down on his wrists. “It’s getting cold.”

“Want to tell me why you’re putting up with your uncle’s bullshit?”

“About Isolde?”

“Yeah, what do you think I’m talking about?”

Johnny flinched as though someone had touched him with a hot cigarette. “You don’t know how it is at my uncle Mark’s house.”

“I’ll take a wild guess. He’s a prick?”

Johnny picked at his nails and rubbed his nose with his wrist. “I think something happened when I was real little. Something I’m not supposed to remember. I have dreams about it. In the dream, I run away so I don’t see something that’s in a room with a closed door.”

“Marcel LaForchette told Dave Robicheaux a story about your uncle sitting in front of his desk while the power was out. There were lights flashing on his face.”

“Marcel said that?”

“According to Dave. Your uncle’s in a cult or he’s got magical powers or something?”

“Marcel better be careful.”

“Or?” Clete asked.

Johnny looked at the waves. “I got to go inside.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I catch colds easy.”

“You’re going to give up your girlfriend to a man like your uncle? You don’t seem like that kind of kid.”

“I’m not a kid.” Johnny stood up, his shirt flattening in the wind. A wave full of bioluminescent organisms that lit like green fireflies slid into the pilings. “We’re not in the place you think we are, Mr. Clete. It’s not the date you think it is, either.”

“Run that by me again?”

“What I said. You don’t have any idea what you’re involved in.”

“In my next life, I’m coming back as a swizzle stick so I won’t have to listen to this kind of stuff anymore.”

“It’s not funny,” Johnny said.

Clete stood up and corked the Champale bottle and dropped it on the chair. He thought he saw, three hundred yards to the south, a large wood boat with two masts and many oars. He wiped at his eyes and looked again. The boat was gone. “I’m going to head back to Fort Lauderdale,” he said.

“I meant it when I said watch out for the cops in Key West.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Clete said. “I got to tell you something about your girlfriend. If I don’t, I’ll resent myself in the morning.”

“Say it.”

“I fathered a daughter out of wedlock. Her mother was a stripper and a junkie. I never learned what happened to my daughter. A pimp is probably banging her now or a guy is shooting her up or giving her AIDS or herpes. You can’t walk off from an innocent girl like Isolde and expect her to land on her feet. Now clean up your act.”

“I can’t handle this, Mr. Clete.”

“Evidently not,” Clete said. “I’ll see you around, kid. I hope you have a good life. Right now you’re genuinely pissing me off.”

Clete walked to his car, the dock tilting as though he were aboard a ship dipping into waves higher than the gunwales.

He made it to Seven Mile Bridge, then pulled onto the shoulder, zoned and shit-blown, a stench rising from his armpits even with the air conditioner on. Voices in his head were arguing with each other, his ears whirring with noises like malarial mosquitoes. Twice Florida Highway Patrol cruisers had gone flying past him, buffeting his rental, their lights flashing. He knew he would be immediately arrested if he were stopped. He also knew the only way to downshift the situation was to park the rental, pull the keys, get in the backseat, drop the keys on the floor, and go to sleep. No reasonable cop would take him in.

But back there on the dock, Johnny’s biggest problem had been on full display. What do you do? Tell the kid not to sweat it, mainlining skag is groovy and the Abyss is probably a blast?

Clete swung off the shoulder, bounced over a divider, scraping the steel frame on the concrete, and headed back for the motel.