A Private Cathedral

Chapter Thirty-one

That night the sky was sealed with clouds that resembled the swollen bellies of whales, and when lightning split the heavens, hailstones thundered down all over Iberia Parish, particularly out on the four-lane, where a slender man wearing a tall-crown hat and a three-piece suit and spit-shined pointy-nose cowboy boots entered a truck stop café and sat down in a booth and ordered a piece of pecan pie and a glass of chocolate milk.

The storm was so severe that most truckers traveling the four-lane had parked under the overpasses to protect their windshields and windows. As a consequence, the man in the Stetson was the only customer in the café. The only waitress on duty, Emily Thibodaux, said she never believed that one day a man in a café would cause her to lose control of her bladder and pee a pool of urine around her shoes.

Carroll LeBlanc and I arrived at the café at a quarter past midnight, just after the first ambulance and fire truck had gotten there. The Thibodaux woman was sitting at a table, smoking a cigarette, her lipstick smeared on the cigarette butt, her hand shaking as violently as her teeth were chattering. A blanket was wrapped around her. She looked like a frightened Eskimo.

“He had silver hair?” Carroll said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Wit’ yellow in it, like dirty soap was ironed into it. His voice was way down inside himself. I don’t t’ink he’s from around here.”

“He had a foreign accent?” I said.

“No, suh. Maybe Texas or Mississippi.” She looked toward the service window in the kitchen. There was a sorrow in her face that I’ve seen only among civilians in war zones or in the aftermath of fatal accidents or natural catastrophes.

“Start over,” Carroll said.

“He come in and sat down and left his hat on. His eyes didn’t have no color.”

“What do you mean, no color?” Carroll said.

“Like cataracts. I brought him his pie and chocolate milk, and he called me back and said did I know Clete Purcel. I tole him Mr. Clete comes in late at night, but he ain’t come in tonight, maybe ’cause of the storm and all. He axed me what time he comes in when he comes in. I tole him I wasn’t sure.”

“That’s what got him jacked up?” Carroll said.

“No, suh,” she said. “I was walking away and he said, ‘This pie tastes like dog turds.’ I tole him that wasn’t a nice way to talk. He said, ‘Talk to me like that again, you cunt, and I’ll put somet’ing in your mout’ ain’t gonna be pie.’ ”

She sniffed and wiped her nose with the back of her wrist.

“Go on,” I said.

“I went in the kitchen and got a fresh piece of apple pie and give it to him.” She drew in on her cigarette and exhaled slowly, staring into the smoke as though she wanted to hide in it.

“Tell us about the homeless man,” Carroll said.

“He come in off the road dragging a suitcase, wit’ ice in his hair, coughing in his hand somet’ing awful. He wanted a cup of coffee, but he only had fifty cents. I tole him I’d make up the difference, me, but I couldn’t give him no food. Troot’ is, I’d get in trouble for letting him stay inside.”

“Go on,” I said.

“The man in the hat tole me I’d better get that pile of stink away from him. I went into the kitchen and got the homeless man a piece of apple pie and tole Tee Boy, that’s the cook, I knowed I was stealing from the café, but I cain’t let nobody starve. I said, ‘At least I’m serving him pie ain’t got no germs on it.’ Tee Boy axed what I meant, and I tole him I spit in the apple pie I give Mr. White Trash for calling other people names.”

She looked for a place to put her cigarette. Carroll took it from her and got up from his chair and flicked it out the door. I waited for him to come back. “What’s the rest of it, Miss Emily?” I said.

“The service window was open,” she said. She looked into space, as though her words were written on air and she would have to look at them the rest of her life. She started to cry.

“This isn’t your fault, Miss Emily,” I said. “This man who came in here is evil. Don’t let him hurt you any more than he has.”

“Tee Boy got seven children.”

Tee Boy was black and must have been six and a half feet tall. I had not looked at the body yet. And I didn’t want to. Through the window, I could see uniformed deputies stringing crime-scene tape around the parking lot and the building. More emergency vehicles were coming down the four-lane, flashers rippling in the rain.

“What happened then?” Carroll said.

“I went back out and started wiping off the tables, like we do before we close, even though we wasn’t closing. I seen a shadow cover my shoulder and arm and hand and then the table, like the shadow was alive. I turned around and he was standing right behind me.”

“How was he dressed?” Carroll said.

“He had on a blue suit and a gray vest that didn’t look like they belonged together. Everyt’ing about him was like that. He had a funny smell, like bedclothes when a man and woman has been lying on them and doing t’ings.”

“Where was the homeless man all this time?” I said.

“In the bat’room,” she said. “If Mr. Fontenot finds out he was in there, I’m gonna lose my job.”

“I’ll talk to your boss,” Carroll said. “Just tell us what happened, Miss Emily.”

“The man said—”

“Said what?” I asked.

“I don’t like using these words. I know his kind. They beat up on women, yeah.”

“What did he say, Miss Emily?” I asked.

“He said, ‘I want you to sit down and watch this, bitch. Then I’m gonna light you up. Oh, am I gonna light you up.’ That’s when I wet myself. The homeless man come out the bat’room door, and the man in the suit shot him t’rew the face. Then he went after Tee Boy.”

“That’s when you hid in the freeze locker?” I said.

“I couldn’t go out the front ’cause he could see me, so I run down the hallway to go out the back, where my car is at. But the Dumpster guy moved the Dumpster and blocked the door.”

“You could hear from inside the locker?” I said.

“Yes, suh,” she said. “Tee Boy couldn’t understand why the man was mad at him. He kept saying, ‘I ain’t got no truck wit’ you.’ Then there was five or six shots. The man said, ‘How you like that, nigger?’ ”

I saw Helen’s cruiser pull up in front. I patted Emily Thibodaux on the back and went into the kitchen. Tee Boy was lying on his side, his face in the shadow of the stove. The wounds were tightly grouped in the center of his chest. The brass on the floor was probably nine-millimeter. The closest shell to the body was six feet away. I realized Helen was standing behind me. “What’s your witness say?” she asked.

“The shooter was asking about Clete,” I said. “He insulted her. She spat in his pie and bragged to the cook about it. Our guy overheard the conversation and went nuts and started shooting.”

“He shot the surveillance cameras, too,” Helen said. She looked at the grouping of the wounds in Tee Boy’s chest and the distance of the shells from the victim. “Think we have a pro?”

“I’m not sure,” I said. “He doesn’t seem to fit.”

“Did you talk to Clete yet?”

“Haven’t had time.”

“This is his late-night hangout when he’s not in the slop chute. That means our guy knows Clete’s routine. Get on it. I’ll do the notification.”

“You know Tee Boy’s family?”

“For twenty years. Tell Clete we want this guy alive.”

I went to Clete’s cottage at the motor court. It was still raining, the oak trees dripping with it, the bayou high and yellow, the surface lighted by an arc lamp on the opposite shore. There was a boom of thunder that shook the water out of the trees. I wondered if, out in the darkness, Gideon was on his galleon, waiting to come back into our lives, adding more souls to his vessel of pain and despair.

I banged on Clete’s door. He answered in his boxer shorts and a strap undershirt. “Why don’t you wake me up in the middle of night?” he said.

I stepped inside and shut the door behind me. “I would have waited till morning, but I thought you might be in danger.”

“How?” he said.

I told him every detail of the shooting: the terrorization of the waitress, the homeless man walking into a bullet that blew his brains on the restroom door, the five rounds pumped methodically into Tee Boy’s chest, the colorless eyes of the shooter, the ill-matched three-piece suit, the spit-shined boots, the language the shooter used to degrade Emily Thibodaux. I also told him about Mark Shondell’s attempt to involve his nephew Johnny with the people who wanted to undo nineteenth-century history.

“I can’t process all this,” Clete said. He was sitting on the bed, still in his underwear. “What does Shondell have to do with the Civil War, and how is that connected with the shooting at the café?”

“I don’t know.”

“Okay, forget Shondell for a minute. The shooter sounds like a guy named Delmer Pickins. He works out of Amarillo and Dallas and beats up hookers and does hits most pros won’t deal with. I saw him at Benny Binion’s World Series of Poker a couple of times. But I never talked to him, and he’s got no reason to be looking for me.”

“What do you mean by ‘hits most pros won’t deal with’?”

“He’ll cowboy anyone for five grand. He does revenge hits and takes pictures for the client.”

“Can you get in touch with him?”

“A guy who wants to kill me?”

“How about cooling it on the irritability?” I said.

“Dave, you’re not hearing me. Pickins is the bottom of the septic tank. Whoever hired him did it because he’s a sadist and bat-shit crazy. He’s also disposable. Know what I think?”

“No.”

“If Delmer Pickins is our guy, he’s after both of us. Or the guy who hired him is.”

I knew where Clete was going, but I didn’t say anything.

“I know Adonis Balangie and Mark Shondell would like to take you off at the neck,” he said. “You got it on with Adonis’s wife — sorry, his companion he never sleeps with — and with his regular punch who he bought a house for. You also took time out to slap Mark Shondell’s face in public.”

“So I’m the one to blame?”

“You didn’t let me finish. I think this is about money. Or power. Adonis isn’t going to hire an ignorant peckerwood like Pickins. This Confederate-statue stuff is the issue. Look, Eddy Firpo had neo-Nazis in his house. Mark Shondell is an elitist and closet racist if I ever saw one. We’re living in weird times, Streak. I bet forty percent of the country wouldn’t mind firing up the ovens as long as the smokestacks are blowing downwind.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“What, about the Herd?”

“Yeah. People are better than that.”

“Keep telling yourself that,” he said.

He got up from the bed and opened the icebox. He pulled out two cans and threw one to me. It was a Diet Dr Pepper. He popped his can and drank from it. “You know how many times you’ve said maybe the South should have won the Civil War?”

“I wasn’t serious.”

“You fooled me. Come on, noble mon. You hate political correctness as much as I do. How about the poor fuck who lost his job because of affirmative action? Here’s a guy who gets a bolt of lightning in the head because of somebody else’s mistakes.”

“I’m the target because of my influence on Johnny Shondell?” I replied.

“No, because you’re intelligent and you’ll give Shondell a hard time politically. Not many people can do that. Plus, he’s a scorpion.”

I sat down next to Clete on the bed. I hadn’t opened my cold drink, and I set it on the night table. I feared for Clete. I was protected by the culture of law enforcement, one that is ferociously tribal in nature. Clete was a disgraced cop, a lone soul sowing destruction and chaos everywhere he went, and hated by the Mob and NOPD. I felt his eyes on the side of my face.

“So why would Shondell send a hitter after you?” I said.

“To get me out of the way so they can go after you unhampered.”

“I think it’s more complicated than that,” I said. “Gideon was sent to burn you alive, Clete. Now this creep Pickins is in town. It’s you they’re after. There’s something in you that’s a threat to them. We just don’t know what it is.”

“Yeah, they’re jealous of my waistline. Where do you dig up this stuff, Dave?”

That was Clete, never able to understand the repository of virtue that lived inside him. He went to the sink and poured his Dr Pepper down the drain. “I’ll get some sheets and a blanket for the couch. You need to get some rest, noble mon. We’ll watch a film. I just rented The Passion of Joan of Arc, made in 1928. I’ve seen it three times. God, that girl was brave.”

Most neuroscientists believe that 95 percent of the human mind is governed by the unconscious. I believe them, because that is the only way I have ever been able to understand the behavior of my fellow man. Jonathan Swift said man was a creature “capable” of reason. I think he had it right. I believe that most human activity is not rational and is often aimed at self-destruction. I also believe that ordinary human beings will participate in horrific deeds if they are provided a ritual that will allow them to put their conscience in abeyance.

I have many memories I can suppress during daylight but which come aborning at night: a battalion aid station in a tropical country, helicopter blades thropping overhead, the raw smell of blood and feces, a man calling for his mother, his entrails blooming from his stomach as though it had been unzipped. The garish images from the aid station are to be expected. But I have another kind of dream, one that frightens and depresses me far more than my experiences in Vietnam.

I witnessed two electrocutions in the Red Hat House at Angola Prison, in both cases at the request of the condemned. The building was constructed in the 1930s to house the most dangerous convicts on the farm. They wore filthy black-and-white-striped uniforms and red straw hats and worked double time on the levee under a boiling sun from first bell count until lockup. More than a hundred convicts were buried in that levee, some of them shot just for the amusement of a notorious gun bull.

Later, the Red Hat House became the home of Angola’s electric chair, known as Gruesome Gertie. The fact that I’d watched passively while a man was cooked alive had a peculiar effect on my life. It did not fit with my perception of the supposed democracy in which I lived. A man wearing waist and leg chains was delivered to the unit by the same people who had fed and cared for him for years on death row. The warden, a rotund man with a hush-puppy accent, oversaw the ritual; also in attendance were the prison chaplain, a physician, two journalists, and what was called “the team,” employees of the state who wore charcoal-gray uniforms and red “boot” patches on their shirtsleeves, the boot appellation derived from Louisiana’s geographic shape.

The executioner, a man I knew for many years, was called “the electrician.” Of all the people in the room, only he showed any emotion, and it was pure hatred for the men he launched into eternity. Not the kind of hatred that flared or the kind that caused people to rage or get drunk or strike others. His anger never left his eyes; there was never more of it and never less of it, as though he nursed it the way a professional drunkard nurses alcohol, the way a man can love a vice so much he dare not abuse it lest it be taken from him.

The preparation of the condemned by the team was methodical. The condemned man’s head was shaved, his rectum packed with cotton, an adult diaper wrapped around his buttocks and genitals, a gown dropped over his body, slippers placed on his feet.

The skin of both men was as gray as shirt board. Their glands seemed no longer able to secrete the juices that kept the tissue on their bones. There was dried mucus on their lips, dirt under their fingernails, razor scrapes in their stubble, and a sheen of fear in their eyes that was luminous. As I watched the preparations taking place a few feet away from the chair in which the condemned sat, I tried to keep in mind the severity of the crimes he had committed. But I couldn’t. I was consumed by the process, the detachment of the team, the specificity of each man’s work, all of it aimed at a pitiful wretch who watched their hands touching his skin, buckling the straps on his body, placing a saline-soaked sponge and caplike electrode on his shaved head, putting a lubricant and electrodes on his ankles, and finally, dropping a black cloth over his face so none of us would have to see its reconfiguration when the first jolt hit him.

Each man’s body stiffened against the straps with such force I thought the oak in the chair would burst apart.

The odor made me think of the laundry where my mother ironed clothes with women of color, inside a building that had no ventilation and no fans. I had a hard time swallowing and had to look at the floor a full minute before I stood up.

I left both executions without speaking to anyone else in the room. On both occasions I rumbled across the cattle guard at the main gate and drove straight to a bar one mile down the two-lane and got swacked out of my mind. In twelve-step programs, pathetic drunkards such as I end up trying to figure out the nature of God, no matter how unknowledgeable we may be about such subjects. But the real mystery for me is not in the unseen but in the one at our fingertips: How is it we can do so much harm to one another as long as we are provided sanction? How is it we make marionettes of ourselves and give all power to those who have never heard a shot fired in anger or had even a glimpse of life at the bottom of the food chain?

The day after the killings on the four-lane was Saturday. I woke up on Clete’s couch at ten A.M. Clete had left me a note that read, “Coffee on the stove, beignets in icebox. I’ll see if I can get a lead on Pickins. Don’t let those motherfuckers get behind you.”