A Private Cathedral

Chapter Twelve

Johnny had fallen on the floor of his room. “Help me get him on the bed,” Clete said.

“Put a pillow under his head and leave him where he is,” Bell said, his eyes roving around the room. “Did you get rid of his works?”

“No,” Clete replied. “Why’d you ask me if I was inside?”

Bell grinned. “You look like you’ve been around. No insult intended. Anyway, I don’t know what to tell you, Mr. Purcel. This kid has tracks on both arms. It’s your decision.”

“I’ll take care of him.”

Bell nodded contemplatively. “Tell me the truth. You’ve been up the road?”

“A navy brig and a few local slams. I was in the Crotch.”

“Semper Fi,” Bell said.

“You were in the Corps?”

“Is it Semper Fi or Semper Cry?” Bell said.

“That’s pretty clever. How about cleaning the potato salad out of your mouth?”

Bell went to the front door and opened it partway. “Come here a second, will you?”

“What for?”

“To show you something,” Bell said. He clicked off the light and opened the door wide. The salt air ballooned into the room. “See all that blackness out there? That’s the world, sport. That’s what I serve. I don’t make the rules or get a vote.”

“What are you talking about?” Clete said.

“You’re probably a PI because you were once a cop who got in trouble. Which means you understand how the system works.”

“Tell you what, bub,” Clete said. “I’ll take care of my friend, and you can roll it up and head on down the road. You know, hasta lumbago or whatever.”

“I was First Cav. Know what the Marines used to tell us about our insignia? ‘The horse they couldn’t ride, the line they couldn’t cross, the color that speaks for itself.’ A piece of shit like you is a gift.”

From his right-hand pocket, he pulled a blackjack and swung it across Clete’s temple. Clete went down like a sandbag, his arms at his sides, his jaw locked open, his face bouncing off the floor.

He woke dressed only in his skivvies, suspended upside down, bound hand and foot, his head perhaps four feet above the ground, in a place where he could see buttonwood and gumbo-limbo trees and sandspits humped like the backs of sand sharks and mangroves and stacks of crab traps and a huge expanse of water and clouds as black as cannon smoke on the horizon.

His feet were attached to a cable that hung from the boom of a giant tow truck. His head felt as though all the blood in his body had settled in the top of his skull; his skin was frigid in the wind.

He remembered nothing after hitting the floor of the motel. One eye was swollen the size of an egg, with only a slit he could see through. For a second he thought he was going to vomit. The water sliding past the mangroves was green and frothy and phosphorescent, as though filled with electric eels. A few hundred yards from shore, he saw a tiered wooden ship, like an ancient prison vessel, its sails furled, its oars dead in the water.

Clete heard someone walking toward him. The steps were measured and heavy, like those of a man wearing boots, the soles crunching grittily, the sound of a man walking with a purpose. Clete thought he smelled gasoline. He felt his colon pucker, his skin shrink, his breath seize in his throat. A man in a cowl stepped into his line of sight. The man was wearing steel-toed boots and leather gloves and tight riveted trousers that were stiff with dirt and grease and hitched high on the hips and tight around the scrotum. Inside the cowl was a narrow face that had the iridescence of the bodies Clete had seen washed from their graves during the monsoon season in Vietnam.

“Know who I am?” the man said.

The voice was guttural, as though the speaker had sand in his throat. Clete had no doubt about the voice’s origins. It lived in his dreams and sometimes in the middle of the day. He’d carried it with him to El Salvador and to the brothels of Bangkok and Saigon’s Bring Cash Alley. The voice was one of ridicule and debasement and often came with a slap on the ear or a razor strop biting into his buttocks or grains of rice he was forced to kneel upon. He had no doubt someone had injected him with a hallucinogen or dropped it in his mouth.

“How you doin’, Pop?” he said. “Long time no see.”

“Know why we’re doing what we’re doing to you?” said the voice inside the cowl.

“I don’t care,” Clete said. “It’s not real.”

“Tell me that five minutes from now.”

Clete squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them again. “Pop, I know that’s you. Don’t tease me.”

“You’ve become a believer?”

“If that’s you, Pop, tell me about the greenhouse on St. Charles.”

“Still thinking about that, are you? You should. You were a bad boy.”

“Tell me.”

The man reached out and spun Clete around. “A rich lady asked you to come to her ice-cream party. You put on your Easter suit and knocked on her front door, but you got sent around back. The yard was full of raggedy-ass colored children. You went back that night with a bag of rocks and broke all the glass in her greenhouse. You cost me a customer.”

“Screw you, Jack.”

“I’m glad you said that. It makes me feel better about my duties.”

“Screw you twice,” Clete said, struggling to keep the anguish from his voice.

The man in the cowl walked away, then returned with a jerry can hanging from his hand, the cap dangling from a chain, the contents sloshing inside. “You shouldn’t have used that language to me. I’ve told you about using profanity.”

“This isn’t happening.”

“When we’re done, your ashes will go into the water. Then you’ll be part of history. Think of it as an honor.”

“Why is that ship out there?”

“You don’t need to worry about that.”

“Why not?”

“You’ll soon join them. Forever.”

“Who is ‘them’?”

“You’ll find out. The galleon culture can be quite intimate. Have you heard about the crews on the Middle Passage?”

“I’ll get you, you cocksucker.”

“They all say that. But I’m still here, and they’re not.”

Then the man began breaking up orange crates and piling the pieces below Clete’s head. He added a box full of wood shavings and wads of newspaper and rotted boards spiked with nails. He began pouring the jerry can on the pile and then on Clete, starting with the soles of his feet, soaking his skivvies, drenching his face and hair.

“If you’re familiar with the procedure, you’re probably aware that I’m showing you a degree of mercy,” the man said. “You’ll go faster than some of the others. Burning from the feet up is no treat.”

“This is a dream. I know it’s a dream. I’ll wait you out.”

“Want to tell me anything? You look like you’re crying.”

“Lean close. I can hardly talk.”

Clete thought he saw the man smile inside the cowl. “You wouldn’t try to spit on me, would you?”

“No,” Clete replied.

The man leaned forward, his right hand behind his thigh. For a second Clete saw a pair of elongated eyes, a harelip, and a nose that resembled the nostrils on a snake. Clete gathered all the phlegm in his throat and tried to spit. The man laughed and threw a tin can filled with gasoline in his face.

“Bad boy,” he said. He rolled a piece of newspaper to use as an igniter and thumbed a Zippo from his watch pocket. “I’m going to step back from the flash. Any last words I can give to your father?”

“Yeah. He never got a break,” Clete said. “When he wasn’t drinking, he was a good guy. You’re a lousy imitator of him. One other thing: If I had a face like yours, I’d be pissed off, too.”

Clete closed his eyes and waited to join the dead who, for decades, in one fashion or another, had been his constant companions. Then he realized he was crying, but he didn’t care. His tears were not for himself. They were for his poor father and mother and the unhappiness to which they woke every day of their lives, and for the wretched childhood of his sisters and for all the suffering he had seen in El Salvador and for the people in a line of hooches he had seen engulfed like haystacks by one snake-and-nape flyover.

He heard the man clink the top off the cigarette lighter and flick the wheel, then smelled the flame crawl up the piece of rolled newspaper. He prayed that his death would come quickly, and no sooner had he finished his prayer than he felt his head begin to swell as though all the blood remaining in his body had filled his cranium and was beginning to boil, squeezing his eyes from their sockets, bursting his eardrums, setting his brain alight.

But something was happening that had nothing to do with the realities of a violent death, particularly one that involved death by burning. He opened his eyes. Instead of flames, he saw a dense white fog puffing off the water, swallowing his body, anointing his brow and eyes, like the cool fingers of a woman stroking his skin, assuring him he would never be abandoned.

He could hear thunder crackling in the clouds and feel rain hitting his body as hard as marbles. The gasoline had been washed from his skin. Hailstones bounced on the ground and pattered on the buttonwoods; waves swollen with organic matter were coursing like a tidal surge through the mangroves. A tree of lightning lit up the clouds from the southern horizon to the top of the sky. The ship with the furled sails and giant oars was gone. In its place, dolphins were leaping from the swells, arching as sleek and hard and sculpted as mythic monsters, reentering the rings of foam they had created.

He felt the winch jerk, then lower him to the ground. He wondered if a deliverance was at hand or if another trick was about to be played upon him. The fog was so white and thick that he wanted to stay inside it forever and float out to sea, far beyond the horizon, and stay in the company of whoever had touched his eyes and brow. He wondered if that had been his mother. Who else could it have been? He was curled like a broken worm on the ground. He could hear feet crunching on the sand and shale, walking toward him, as loud and metronomic and heavy as the blood drumming inside his head.

Don’t do this to me, he said to someone. Please.

The words did not sound like his.