A Private Cathedral

Chapter Thirty

At eleven that night I walked along the edge of the Teche to a live oak that was over two hundred years old, not far from the old Burke home. It was here, on V-J Day in 1945, that I first fished with my father. He was a huge, illiterate man who fought in saloons for fun and racked pipe on the monkey board high above a drilling rig on the Gulf of Mexico, under the stars, the wind in his face, the waves crashing below, fearless unto the day the drill punched into an early pay sand and the casing blew out of the hole and Big Aldous Robicheaux clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo line and leaped into the dark, never to be seen again.

But I no longer dwelled on the tragedy of my father and mother, and the deprivation and violence and loneliness that defined their lives. Rather than thinking of Big Aldous’s last moments sliding down the guy wire as the rig melted and toppled with him, I thought of this spot on the bayou where he taught me how to fish. He had bought me a cane pole and a balsa-wood bobber and a weight fashioned out of a perforated .36-caliber lead ball he bought from a colored man for twenty cents. It was a fine gift to receive, but I could catch no fish with it, although I baited the hook first with crickets, then night crawlers, and finally red wigglers.

In my disgust, I swung the weight, the hook, and the bobber out in the center of the lily pads and fouled the hook in the roots below. I was ready to throw my pole in the water. Big Aldous was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, blowing the smoke into the wind. He flicked the cigarette in the bayou. “Don’t be getting mad, no,” he said. “You got to outt’ink the fish, you.”

I was lost.

“See, you done put your hands on the bait, Davie,” he said. “The fish can smell you. So you got to change the smell.”

“How do I do that?” I said.

“Spit on your bait. What you t’ink?”

I lifted the poor drowned worm on my hook from the water and spat on it, then swung over the current. The bobber floated downstream about one foot and plunged out of sight. I pulled up the cane pole with such violence that I broke it in half and flung a goggle-eye perch into a limb above my head. My father had to borrow a rake from the Burke home and comb the fish out of the tree.

I don’t mean to tire others with this account. But everyone has a private cathedral that he earns, a special place to which he returns when the world is too much late and soon, and loss and despair come with the rising of the sun. For me it was the little dry mudbank on which I now stood, the tide rippling past me, the ducks murmuring and ruffling their wings among the cattails and flooded bamboo.

Then a giant wobbling soap bubble of incandescence descended on the bayou, bent and distorted, metamorphic, its colors changing from pink to yellow and red and pink again, as though it were swirling with fire that contained no heat. In the center was the galleon Clete and I had seen before, the oars dipping into the Teche, but this time Gideon was standing in the bow, beckoning. “Don’t be afraid,” he called.

“No, I will not board your ship, sir,” I said.

“You must.”

“I came as you asked,” I said. “Please do not act in an authoritarian fashion.”

A boarding hatch opened on the gunwale, and a ramp slid from the deck to the bank. I found myself drawn up the ramp, inside the bubble, the light as tangible as tentacles on my skin.

Gideon was not wearing a cowl. His tiny ears and nose and the reptilian tightness of the skin on his face and skull were frightening.

Down below, between the hull and the deck on both sides of the ship, were row after row of men chained to their benches and oars, some dozing with their heads on their chests, others with the expressions you would associate with infants ripped from their mothers’ grasp.

In the midst of the oarsmen sat Jess Bottoms, his feet bare, chains attached to his wrists and ankles. His hair was barbered and his clothes were clean. His face was stupefied. He was examining his chains as though he could not understand their presence on his body.

“Sometimes decades pass before these fellows know where they are,” Gideon said. “In reality, all of us are outside of time. There is no past, present, or future. The future you and Mr. Purcel have is already taking place. It will just take a little while for you to find your way to it.”

“I don’t wish to talk about the future,” I said. “I don’t want to be on board your ship, either.”

“You’re just a visitor, Mr. Robicheaux. People such as you don’t make the cut.”

“Then why am I here?”

“I need you to help me.”

“Sir?”

“I was used to kill many people. I have no peace. The one I grieve over most is Leslie Rosenberg. She was totally innocent of any crime. I hate what I have done.”

“Any crimes you have committed were done with your own consent. I suggest you lose the ashes-and-sackcloth routine.”

“You won’t help me?”

“I’m not a theologian. Call up Father Julian.”

“Evil people are about to hurt him.”

“Mark Shondell?” I said.

“Don’t speak to me about the Shondells.”

“You were at his house,” I said. “Marcel LaForchette saw you there.”

“I will not discuss this.”

“You worked for him. Why denounce him now?”

“Don’t tempt me, Mr. Robicheaux.”

“Then don’t be a hypocrite.”

“Be gone with you,” he said.

“Did you kill Firpo?”

“I kill no one. They kill themselves.”

“That’s a lie,” I said.

“I can do you great injury.”

“The words of a bully,” I said. “I thought better of you.”

His skin and the scales on it were luminous with an oily sweat. He raised his hand as though to strike me. I knew I was in mortal danger but could not move. Suddenly, Gideon and the galleon and the poor devils on it disappeared, and I was on the bank, deep in the shadow of the live oak, the air dank and cold and throbbing with frogs.

I walked home like a drunk man and woke in the morning facedown on the couch, my clothes on, the soles of my shoes rimmed with mud.

It wasn’t easy to tell Helen Soileau all this, but I did. As she listened, she flicked a ballpoint pen in a circle on her ink blotter. She had started her career as a meter maid at NOPD and had ended up my partner in Homicide in New Iberia. I believed several people lived inside Helen, both male and female, all of them complex. She was a good cop and a brave and loyal friend but also mercurial and sometimes violent.

After I finished, she propped her cheek and chin at an angle on her palm, as a teenager might. “There are a couple of things that bother me about your account, bwana. Number one, you said this character Gideon mentioned Vietnam and calling for air support.”

“That’s right. He knew things about me he could have no knowledge of.”

“But he used a phrase I’ve heard you use before: ‘Did he smile upon his work to see?’ Where’s that from?”

“William Blake’s poem about the nature of evil.”

“You and Gideon read the same books?”

“That’s a possibility,” I said.

“The other part that bothers me is you say you walked home like a drunk man.”

“I haven’t been drinking, Helen.”

“When was your last drink?”

“Nineteen months ago.”

She dropped her ballpoint in a drawer. “This story doesn’t just sound crazy, it scares the shit out of me,” she said. “I have to be honest, Streak. I think you’re having a nervous breakdown.”

“Is Clete having one? Is Leslie Rosenberg having one?”

“Ever hear of mass hysteria? How about Salem, 1692?”

“I told you what I saw and heard,” I said. “Do with it as you wish. I’ll see you later.”

“This morning I heard from Baton Rouge PD,” she said. “The sugar cubes from Father Julian’s refrigerator contained LSD. Second item: A friend of mine who works in the diocesan office says two anonymous callers have accused Father Julian of child molestation. A third caller said he tried to rape her.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“They have to deal with it. Father Julian has pissed off a lot of people, particularly these right-to-life fanatics.”

“I think this is Mark Shondell at work,” I said.

“Let Father Julian fight his own battles, bwana.”

“Great attitude,” I said.

“Have you ever considered the possibility Julian may not be innocent?”

“He killed Eddy Firpo? Stop it.”

“How did his stamps end up on Firpo’s shoe?” she said.

“They were planted.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Glad I’m on the side of the good guys,” I said.

I walked out of the office. She wadded up a piece of paper and threw it at my back. I walked back inside and picked it up and placed it on her desk. “Shame on you, Helen,” I said.

That night I ate by myself at Clementine’s. Outside, dust was swirling out of the streets, paper boxes and pieces of newspaper bouncing down the asphalt and the sidewalks. The light was strange, too, as though it were draining from the western sky into the earth, not to be seen again, robbing us of not only the day but the morrow as well. Of course, these feelings and perceptions are not uncommon in people my age. This was different. As I mentioned earlier, I have long believed that my generation is a transitional one and will be the last to remember what we refer to as traditional America. But somehow the fading of this particular evening seemed a harbinger of a sea change, perhaps a tectonic shift in the plates on which our civilization stood.

Vanity? That could be. But how do you just say fuck you to the culture and the people who kept Hitler and Tojo from shaking hands across the Mississippi?

The front door opened, and with a gust of rain-peppered wind at his back, Johnny Shondell walked past the bar and sat down across from me in the dining room, the candle on my table flickering on his white sport coat. “What’s happenin’, Mr. Dave?” he said.

“No haps, Johnny,” I said.

He looked his old youthful self, his system free of skag and tobacco and booze. His dark blue silk shirt was unbuttoned at the top, exposing his tan chest.

“Where’s Isolde?” I said. I didn’t know whether they were still on the run from Mark Shondell. I assumed they were not, since the uncle had been at the nightclub in Baton Rouge to hear Johnny and Isolde play when Eddy Firpo was slashed to death.

Johnny’s gaze roamed around the room. “She’s at the motel. We’re flying out to Nashville in the morning for a session at Martina and John McBride’s Blackbird Studios. It’s an album tribute to Hank Williams. Did you know he was the crossover guy to rock and roll, not Elvis? Listen to ‘My Bucket’s Got a Hole in It.’ Your neighbor told me you were probably here.”

“Can I help you with something?”

He looked over his shoulder and back at me. “Mr. Dave, you’re the only person who came to see me in rehab. I won’t ever forget that. So I thought maybe I could tell you about something that’s tearing me up, that I don’t understand, and that I can’t talk to other people about.”

“Does this have to do with your uncle Mark?”

“He wants me and Isolde to get involved with some of these college kids who want to take down the Confederate flag and the statues of the generals or some shit like that.” His eyes went away from mine as though he had said something obscene.

“When did your uncle become the John Brown of New Iberia?” I said.

“You mean the guy who tried to set the slaves free?”

“Yeah, that John Brown.”

“Uncle Mark has always treated black people okay. Right?”

Because to him, they’re not important enough to think about one way or another, I thought. “How do you feel about the issue?”

“A lot of our fans carry Styrofoam spit cups. Plus, they don’t come to a concert to beat each other up.”

“I’m not objective about your uncle,” I said. “But everyone in this town knows he does nothing that is not in his interest. They also know he will destroy anyone who gets in his way. Why would he want to help college kids tear down statues of people who have been dead for over a hundred years?”

“You got me,” he said.

“If you really want to make people mad, tell them you’ve decided which flags they can fly and which icons they can see in public places,” I said. “You’re a smart kid, Johnny. Whom do you think this benefits?”

“Right-wing dipshits in general?”

“That says it all, partner.”

He looked wanly at the ceiling. It was plated with stamped tin and had been there since the nineteenth century. “Can I say something else?” he asked.

“I’m listening.”

“Isolde’s mother has got it in for you. The only thing stopping Adonis Balangie from hurting you has been Miss Penelope.”

“I hope you and Isolde have great careers,” I said.

“Don’t shine me on, Mr. Dave. You’ve seen Gideon recently, haven’t you? Up so close you couldn’t lie to yourself about who or what he is?”

I felt the air go out of my lungs. “How do you know that?”

“It’s in your eyes. You’ve seen things other people won’t believe. So you’ve stopped talking about them.”

“I stopped talking about them after I came back from Vietnam, Johnny.”

“Yeah? Well, the Shondells and the Balangies stopped jerking themselves around over four hundred years ago. That’s why Adonis Balangie’s eyes are dead. That’s why I accept the fact that my uncle Mark might be a monster. The world is a fucking zoo.”

“Don’t use language of that kind, Johnny,” I said.

“I got to ask you something.”

“What?” I said, knowing what was coming next.

“Did you sleep with Miss Penelope?”

I crimped my lips and didn’t answer.

“I didn’t think you were that kind of guy, Mr. Dave,” he replied. “She’s a sweet lady. I think that blows.”

Try going home and falling asleep with words like those in your head.