A Private Cathedral

Chapter Thirty-five

By mid-afternoon Clete was out of his funk and concentrated on our objective. He called the airboat pilot who had given him information about Shondell and asked him to meet us in a café ten miles up the road. I told Carroll to keep his eyes on Shondell’s stilt house. The airboat pilot was a Cajun from Houma who had lost a leg in the propeller of his father’s airboat when he was twelve. He had intense brown eyes and a narrow unshaved face that made me think of an unhusked coconut. His name was Dallas Landry. He said he had seen no sign of a young couple matching the description of Johnny and Isolde.

“How about the guys on the tug?” I said. “You talk to them at all?”

“They ain’t the kind of guys you talk to,” he said.

“How many guys are there?” Clete asked.

“Four or five. Lots of ink on both arms. They got women wit’ ’em, too.”

“Hookers?” Clete said.

“They ain’t from the convent.”

“You’ve been very helpful, Dallas,” I said. “Is there anything else you can tell us?”

“Mr. Mark had a guy there a couple of times. A lawyer, maybe. They was laughing about Adonis Balangie. They said they was gonna take everyt’ing he’s got. I pretended I didn’t hear nothing. He’s got a five-hundred-foot yacht about two miles out in the Gulf. He’s got sailboats on it.”

There was another question I wanted to ask him. He wasn’t the kind of man we euphemistically call a “confidential informant,” many of whom are motivated by aggrandizement or fear or a desire to be accepted or to feel important. He was taking considerable risk, the least of which was loss of his job.

“Why’d you come forward, Dallas?” I said.

He stared at his coffee cup. “Mr. Mark bothers me.”

“In what way?” I said.

“I ain’t got a way of putting it. It’s the way he looks at them young girls. I ain’t seen him put a hand on them. But I seen the way he looks. Somet’ing else, too.” He knotted his fingers.

“Go on,” I said.

“He got somet’ing dark in him, Mr. Robicheaux.”

Just then Carroll LeBlanc came through the café entrance. “What’s going on with you guys?” he said.

“You’re supposed to be watching the stilt house,” Clete said.

“I didn’t know where y’all were,” Carroll said. He glanced at Dallas Landry. “Who are you?”

“I run an airboat service,” Dallas said.

“Oh yeah, Clete told me.”

“Walk outside with me,” Clete said to Carroll.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Carroll said. “What the hell is going on?”

Clete went outside by himself and got in his Caddy.

“See you around, Mr. Robicheaux,” Dallas said.

“You, too,” I said.

Carroll sat down at the table. I wanted to take him apart.

“I saw Johnny Shondell, so cool your jets, Dave,” he said. “I couldn’t get cell service, so I motored on up the road.”

“You’re sure it was Johnny?”

“He was standing on Shondell’s deck, wearing shades and a Hawaiian shirt. He looked pretty relaxed.”

“You’ve got beer on your breath,” I said.

“You want me to bag ass, I’ll understand.”

“Get your act together, Carroll,” I said. “I’ll see you at the motel.”

“You trying to hurt me?” he said.

I went outside and got in the Caddy. The top was up, the hand-waxed pink paint job sprinkled with leaves from the oak tree overhead.

“You don’t look too hot,” Clete said.

“You’re the best guy I’ve ever known, Clete,” I replied.

He started the engine, an unlit Lucky Strike hanging from his mouth. “Sometimes you truly perplex me, noble mon.”

There are epiphanies most of us do not share with others. Among them is the hour when you make your peace with death. You don’t plan the moment; you do not acquire it by study. Most likely, you stumble upon it. It’s a revelatory moment, a recognition that death is simply another player in our midst, a fellow actor on Shakespeare’s grand stage, perhaps one even more vulnerable than we are, one who is unloved, excoriated, condemned to the shadows, and denied either rest or joy. John Donne went so far as to refer to this sad figure as “Poor Death.”

That evening I saw a transformation in the heavens that to this day I cannot explain. As I stood on a sand spit and watched the lights come on in the Shondell stilt house, the tide washing through miles of sawgrass, I realized the sky had turned a gaseous green, and the air had become as heavy and dense as a barrel of wet salt, the sun buried in a solitary cloud on the horizon, blood-red and flaming orange, like the inside of a torn peach.

As if on a panoramic movie screen, I saw Vikings slaying villagers with their axes, Richard the Lionheart’s Crusaders beheading Muslims on their knees, Buonaparte setting fire to a Russian village in the snow, the boys in butternut dropping like wheat on Cemetery Ridge, Comanche Indians dragging children with ropes through cactus, British tanks crashing down on a German trench at the Somme.

I saw the slaughter of the innocents at Nanking, Ernest Hemingway blown to shit in an Italian field hospital, Audie Murphy firing a fifty-caliber on top of a tank that was burning, James Bowie tossed on bayonets in the chapel at the Alamo, a navy corpsman pulling Clete down a napalm-scorched hillside on a poncho liner, and I saw myself calling in Puff the Magic Dragon on an Asian village, and maybe for the first time in my life, I realized the insignificance of my own death.

I also realized that the re-creation of my generation and era in the form of Isolde Balangie and Johnny Shondell was an innocent fantasy and a fitting tribute to the New Orleans Sound. The piano keys tinkling with a fragility like crystal, the throaty resonance of the saxophone, the muffled rolling of the drums, the coon-ass and Irish Channel accents of the vocalists, all of it echoing as though recorded in an empty college gym, all of it leading one day into Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound — this was the era that I always believed was the best in our history. But it was gone, and to mourn its passing was to demean it. The ethereal moment lives on in the heart, so what is there to fear?

I heard Clete behind me. “Ready to boogie?” he said.

“When you are,” I replied.

He was wearing his porkpie hat and a raincoat, his hands in the pockets. He looked at the waves sliding in with the tide; they were dark, laced with foam, filled with shell life. “Smell that air.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“I got a feeling about something. We’re standing on the edge of creation. Or maybe the end of it.”

“Could be.”

“Dallas is putting his airboat in the water,” he said.

“What’s under your coat?”

He opened the flap. A cut-down sawed-off Remington twelve-gauge pump hung under his armpit.

“I hope we don’t have to use that,” I said.

“Shondell could grind us into fish chum and nobody would miss a beat, Dave.”

I let my eyes go flat.

“Not in front of Penelope Balangie?” he said.

“Something like that.”

“Dave, your learning curve never ceases to surprise me.”

Dallas Landry had pulled the airboat up to the dock. I knocked on Carroll’s door at the motel. He pulled it open so quickly that my hand fell into empty space. “It’s time?” he said.

“Yeah, what do you think?” I said.

He had showered and changed into elastic-waist slacks, boat shoes, a long-sleeve jersey, and a sport coat. He was wearing a shoulder holster, his badge hanging from his neck. “What are you carrying?” he said.

“Snub thirty-eight.”

“You got an ankle rig?”

“Dial it down, Carroll.”

“What do we do about the guys on the tug?”

“That’s up to them,” I said.

“You’re not talking about blowing up anybody’s shit?”

“No.”

“Because that sounds like Purcel. Are there twelve-step programs for brain disease? That guy doesn’t understand boundaries.”

“Is there anything you want to tell me, Carroll?”

“Like confess something?”

“Call it what you will.”

“I already told you. My daughter needs my help.”

“Time to rock, partner,” I said.

We walked outside, into the wind and salt spray and the smell of shellfish stranded in the sawgrass by receding waves. Carroll was breathing heavily, his mouth tight, his nostrils swelling. “I’m with you, Robo. If we got to put hair on the walls, that’s the way it is. Right? Fucking A. We got to keep the lines simple.”

This was the guy afraid of blowing up people’s shit?

We rode on the airboat to the stilt house and got out on a floating dock that was fastened to the pilings. Dallas Landry cut the propeller just as a big man exited the cabin on the tug and shone a flashlight on us. Carroll lifted his badge from his chest so it caught the flashlight’s beam. “Get back in the cabin, asshole,” he said.

I could hear waves slapping against the pontoons on the airboat. The man went back in the cabin. I told Dallas to come back in one hour.

“I t’ought you wanted me to wait,” he said.

“We’d rather have you in a safe place,” I said. “If we’re not standing outside in one hour, call for the cavalry.”

“Yes, suh, I got it,” he said.

He clamped on his ear protectors and restarted the propeller, then drove away, the backdraft flattening the water. I started to mount the steel steps that led to the deck above us, then I heard a sound I had heard before: wood stroking against wood, oars lifting and dropping back into the waves, perhaps a taskmaster drumming cadence on a forecastle. Clete heard it, too. I searched the horizon in all four directions but saw only the black-green curl of the waves and a lighted ship on the southern horizon.

“That bastard is out there, isn’t he?” Clete said.

I nodded but didn’t answer. Carroll looked at me and at Clete and then at me again. “What are y’all talking about?”

“You didn’t hear anything?” I said.

“No, nothing. Something’s going on?”

“It’s probably a buoy,” I said.

Carroll’s eyeballs were clicking back and forth. “You’re not talking about this ghoul or whatever?”

“Stay behind me,” I said.

I climbed the stairs, my shoes ringing on the steel steps, then crossed the deck in the wind and knocked on the door. The waves below were gaining strength, pitching against the tugboat and smacking the floating dock against the pilings. I wondered about the tolerance of Dallas Landry’s airboat.

Mark Shondell answered the door in a red smoking jacket like Hugh Hefner might wear. “Why, Dave, how good of you to come see us. And Mr. LeBlanc and Mr. Purcel. We were just discussing the possibility that the Aryan race might not be the most intelligent after all, and then in you walk.”

The interior of the living room was exotic, the walls covered with bookshelves and leopard and zebra skins, the furniture made of African blackwood and ivory and glass, the carpet an inch thick, swirling with color. A chandelier burned with the warm radiance of candles.

Adonis and Penelope and Johnny Shondell were standing at the mantel below a brass clock. They stared at us like people who had suffered a heart attack. But I was no longer looking at them or the decor in the living room or even Mark Shondell. Through the window, I could see waves bursting on the bow of a double-decked galleon, its long oars dripping green fire.

“We were in the neighborhood,” I said. “Is Isolde home?”