A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

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  For James Joseph Hogan One of the good guys who has walked the walk with us for over thirty years

  “Going down in Lou’sana, gonna git me a mojo hand.”

  —Muddy Waters

  Chapter One

  YOU KNOW HOW it is when you’ve kicked around the globe too long and scorched your grits too many times with four fingers of Jack in a mug and a beer back, or with any other kind of flak juice that was handy. And if that wasn’t enough, maybe doubling down in the morning with a half-dozen tall glasses of crushed ice and cherries and sliced oranges and vodka to drive the snakes and the spiders back into the basement.

  Wow, what a gas. Who thought we’d ever die?

  But why get into all that jazz? I’ll tell you why. I’m talking about those moments when you strip your gears, whether you’re chemically loaded or not, and get lost inside the immensity of creation and see too deeply into our ephemerality and our penchant for greed and war and willingness to destroy the Big Blue Marble, and for a brief moment you scare yourself so badly you wonder why you didn’t park your porridge on the ceiling a long time ago.

  That kind of moment came to me once when I was standing on a Texas dock in the sunset while the waves rolled below me and thudded as hard as lead against the pilings, an incandescent spray blowing as cool as refrigeration on my clothes and skin, a green-gold light as bright as an acetylene torch in the clouds, the amusement pier ringing with calliope music and the popping of shooting galleries. It was one of the moments when you hang between life and death and ache to hold on to the earth and eternity at the same time, regretting all those days and nights you pitched over the gunwales while you deconstructed your life.

  I’m talking about the acknowledgment of mortality, and not the kind that slips up on you in a hospice or on a battlefield filled with the cawing of carrion birds or by way of a drunk driver bouncing over a curb into a playground. I’m talking about seeing the Seventh Seal at work and a string of medieval serfs and liege lords and virginal maidens wending their way across a hilltop to a valley dark as oil, their silhouettes blowing like pieces of carbon in the wind.

  The people who have these moments of metaphysical clarity are what I call members of the Three Percent Club, because in my opinion that’s approximately the percentage of people who fry a couple of their lobes and are able to talk about it later. You can pay your dues in lots of ways: on a night trail sprinkled with Chinese toe-poppers and booby-trapped 105 duds; or stacking time on the hard road; or kneeling on a hard floor in a convent with a rosary twisted around your knuckles; or listening to voices in your head that are as loud as megaphones. The surroundings don’t matter. You’re in a black box for the duration, Jason. You literally sweat blood, bud. To say it’s a motherfucker doesn’t come close.

  After you’re through with the long night of the soul, or after it’s through with you, you’re never the same. Earthly fears disappear like a great weight removed from a scale. You have no inclination to argue or hold grudges; reticence becomes a way of life; it’s hard to stay awake during an average conversation.

  The downside is you’re on your own, the only occupant in a cathedral in which you can hear your heartbeat echoing off the walls.

  What does all this have to do with Johnny Shondell? I’ll tell you. He was out of another era, even though he was more symbolic of it than part of it, an era we always want to resurrect, whether we admit it or not. Jesus talked about people who are made different in the womb. I’ll take that a step further. Maybe some people were never in the womb. They arrive inside a golden bubble and somehow become the icon for the rest of us. At least that’s how I thought of Johnny and Isolde. Call it a scam or a sham or the stupidity of the herd, who cares? The only reality you have is the one you believe in. I say eighty-six the rest of it.

  Back in that other era, America was still America, for good or bad. Men such as Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower were president; we didn’t have the daily arrival of the clown car. People can say that’s just nostalgia talking. They’re wrong. For us in Louisiana it was a time of music and drive-in movies and starry skies and two-lane roads that meandered for miles through meadows and oak trees hung with Spanish moss. If you don’t believe me, ask my friend Clete Purcel. He’ll tell you all about it. I can almost hear him now: “It was deeply copacetic, noble mon. You can take that to the shack, Jack. I wouldn’t give you the slide, Clyde.”

  * * *

  BUT LET’S GO back to that summer evening on the dock many years ago. I had an appointment the next day at Huntsville Pen, one I didn’t want to think about, so I walked onto the amusement pier and saw Johnny Shondell up on the bandstand, belting it out to a crowd of teenage girls whose faces glowed not only with adoration but with a vulnerability that made you ache to hold and protect them.

  Johnny’s parents had been killed in an airplane accident when he was very young, and he had been raised by his uncle Mark. I had watched him grow up around New Iberia the way you watch kids grow up in a small town: You see them at a church service, playing a pinball machine in a café, smacking a baseball, quarterbacking at the state finals, rocking at the senior hop, boxing in the Golden Gloves, or boosting cars or getting involved in cruel and hateful behavior such as nigger-knocking and the abuse of the poorest of the poor. Johnny didn’t fit in a category. His musical talent was one step short of cosmic, and the first time you heard him play and sing, you knew he’d hooked on to the tail of a comet and would defy both mortality and improbability. Yeah, that’s right, in his journey across the heavens he’d sprinkle the rest of us with stardust, even if he was a member of the Shondell family, millionaire liars and bums that they were.

  You bet, the Shondells had money, tons of it, but like most wealthy people in our Caribbean culture, they made it off the backs of others and had family secrets that involved miscegenation and exploitation of the out-of-wedlock children they sired. Don’t be shocked. In Louisiana we don’t have Confederates in the attic. We have them everywhere, including the basement and the outbuildings, the cistern and sometimes couched in the forks of our emblematic live oaks.

  Johnny wore white slacks and a maroon silk shirt that puffed with wind. His physique was as lithe as a whip, his black hair combed in ducktails, thick and glistening; the stars were white and cold overhead, as though the backdrop had been created for that particular moment, one that was Homeric, as foolish as that sounds. Hey, even the waves had turned wine-dark under the moon, as though I were watching either the beginning or the end of an era.

  “I know you,” a voice said behind me.

  I turned around. The girl who had spoken couldn’t have been over seventeen. Her hair was whitish-blond, her skin the color of chalk, her cheeks pink like a doll’s. A tattoo of roses and orchids dripped off her left shoulder (this was at a time when nice girls in New Iberia were not allowed to leave home with bare arms). “You don’t remember me?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t have my glasses,” I lied.

  “I’m Isolde Balangie. You know my family.”

  Oh, yes, I thought.

  “You’re a police officer,” she said. “You used to come in my father’s restaurant in the French Quarter. But you’re from New Iberia. That’s where my family is from, too. After Italy, I mean.”

&nb
sp; “I used to be a police officer.”

  “You’re not one anymore?”

  “Sometimes I am.”

  She had hazel eyes that went away from you in a sleepy fashion, then came back as though she were waking from a dream. “What does ‘sometimes’ mean?”

  “I was fired from NOPD. Getting fired is my modus operandi.”

  “Fired for what?”

  “I was a drunk.”

  “You’re not now, are you?”

  “A drunk is a drunk.” I tried to smile.

  Her gaze remained fixed on Johnny Shondell, her lips parting, and I knew she was no longer listening to me. I also knew my problems weren’t worth talking about and were part of the chemically induced narcissism that every boozer carries with him like a sacred flame.

  “It was nice seeing you, Miss Isolde,” I said.

  “You believe in kismet?”

  “Where’d you hear of kismet?”

  “At the movies. Do you believe in it?”

  “I think it’s Arabic for ‘God’s will.’ I’m no expert about things like that.”

  “My family has hated the Shondells for four hundred years.”

  “That’s a little unusual.”

  Her face sharpened. “They burned my ancestor.”

  “Pardon?”

  “At the stake. In chains. They put nails through his mouth so he couldn’t talk. Then they made him suffer as much as they could.”

  I stared at her.

  “You don’t believe me?” she said.

  “Sure.”

  “That’s why I think the Shondells should be killed.”

  “Killed?”

  “Or blown up or something.”

  “So why are you here watching Johnny?”

  “He’s delivering me to his uncle Mark.”

  I didn’t want to hear any more. The Balangie family was trouble, their ways arcane and, some said, incestuous. “Take care of yourself, kid.”

  “That’s all you have to say?”

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  “Then fuck you.”

  There is no human being who can become angrier than an injured teenage girl. I winked at her and walked away. That night I slept with the windows open in a salt-eaten, wood-framed 1940s motel room. I heard the waves pounding on the beach, devouring the sand, as though the tide were sliding backward in mockery of itself.

  Chapter Two

  I WAS SCHEDULED TO visit a convict in Huntsville at eleven A.M. But I didn’t show up until four in the afternoon because I idled away the morning in Hermann Park Zoo and also watched some boys play softball. I wasn’t looking forward to my visit with an inmate named Marcel LaForchette, and I was tired of evil and all its manifestations and our attempts to explain its existence. If you’ve ever dealt with evil, the real deal, up close and personal, you know what I mean.

  How do you explain the Hillside Strangler or Ted Bundy? Childhood trauma? Maybe. When you read the details of what they did, you feel a sadness and a sense of revulsion that makes you wonder if we all descend from the same tree.

  I don’t mean Marcel was a ghoul or he would sexually torture and murder a woman or girl the way Bundy did. Marcel was made out of different clay, I just didn’t know what. He was from the little town of Jeanerette, down the bayou from New Iberia, and came from a background not much different than mine, poor illiterate Cajuns like my mother, who worked in a laundry, and my father, who trapped and fished and racked pipe on the monkey board of an offshore drilling rig.

  I graduated high school when I was seventeen. At the same age, in the same year, Marcel started a three-to-five bit in an adult prison for grand auto. When he was still a fish, he was cannibalized and made the punk of a half-dozen degenerates. You know what was oddest about Marcel? He never got tattooed, and this was in an environment where men wear sleeves from the wrist to the armpit as an indicator of their jailhouse mileage.

  The other peculiarity about Marcel was his eyes. They were turquoise, the radiance trapped inside them so intense you couldn’t read them. His thoughts could have been ethereal in nature or straight from the Marquis de Sade, but few people wanted to find out. Marcel was a button man. When Marcel pushed the “off” button, the target hit the floor like a sack of early potatoes.

  Twenty miles from the pen, on the two-lane back road, I saw a purple Oldsmobile make the curve behind me. I thought I remembered seeing it at the zoo in Houston, but I couldn’t be sure. I pulled in to a roadside park inside a grove of slash pines. The Olds passed me; its windows were tinted, the license plate caked with mud. Then a phenomenon occurred that I had seen twice before: A wide column of tarantulas crossed the road like a stream of wet tar in a creek bed. Years ago the tarantulas had come to the Texas coast on banana boats and spread inland, hence their presence on a state highway far from Galveston. Nonetheless, I wondered if I was watching an omen, one that meant no good would come from my visit with Marcel, a man whom I could have become or perhaps who could have dressed in my skin.

  * * *

  MY RELATIONSHIP WITH the assistant warden got me in, but it didn’t get me liked. Back then I didn’t have a good reputation, and I was late on top of it, and to make it worse, at least in terms of my conscience, I had lied and told an administrative officer I was investigating a crime in Louisiana and hoped to get some help from Marcel.

  Two gun bulls brought him from the field in waist and ankle chains, and sat him down in a small concrete-floored room with two chairs and a wood table and a window that looked out on the Walls, the huge redbrick complex of buildings and ramparts that were an architectural emanation of the original 1848 structure. Both gun bulls were big men with big hands and wore coned cowboy hats, their armpits dark and looped with sweat, their thoughts hidden behind their shades.

  “Sorry to make a problem for you guys,” I said.

  One of them sucked a tooth. “We don’t have anything else to do,” he said. The door was constructed of both bars and heavy steel plates. He slammed it into the jamb and twisted a tiny key in the lock, a drop of sweat leaking from his hairline.

  Marcel was wearing work boots that looked as stiff and uncomfortable as iron, and a dirty white pullover and white pants stained at the knees. He had a Gallic nose and a high forehead and sweaty salt-and-pepper hair; his body was taut as whipcord. He gave me a lopsided grin but did not speak. His eyes were unblinking, the pupils no more than small black dots, as though he were staring at a bright light.

  “Why the chains?” I said.

  “This is Texas, second only to Arkansas when it comes to the milk of human kindness,” Marcel answered.

  “In your postcard you said you had a gift for me.”

  “Information.”

  “But you want something first?”

  “Know what it’s like here when the lights go out? Show a li’l respect.”

  I looked at my watch. “I want to get back to New Iberia this evening.”

  He worked a crick out of his neck, his chains tinkling. “I’m doing eleven months and twenty-nine days, two jolts back to back. Follow me?”

  “No.”

  “The judge gave me one day less than a year so I’d have to serve my sentences in a county bag that’s making money off the head count. Except somebody screwed up and sent me to Huntsville. My lawyer is getting me paroled. But I’ll have to do my parole time in Texas.”

  “What does this have to do with me?”

  “I want to go back to Louisiana. I want to go straight.”

  “You?”

  “Maybe I could do security work. Or be a PI.”

  “You were a mechanic, Marcel.”

  “No, I got caught up in a gang war in Brooklyn. Then there was a li’l trouble in New Orleans. But I never clipped nobody for hire.”

  “Why are you in chains?”

  “A Mexican got shanked in the chow line. I was in the vicinity.”

  “You didn’t do it?”

  “I’d joog a guy when I’m about to go home?”
r />   “Yeah, if he got in your face, you would,” I said.

  The sun was a dull red in the west, and I could see dust devils spinning out of a cotton field, breaking apart in the wind. Six mounted gun bulls were silhouetted like black cutouts against a horizon that could have been the lip of the Abyss. “Didn’t you work for the Balangie family?”

  “Briefly.”

  “I ran into Isolde Balangie last night. At an amusement pier. She was there to see Johnny Shondell.”

  “Get the fuck outta here.”

  “Teenage girls aren’t drawn to guys like Johnny Shondell?”

  “The Balangie and the Shondell families get along like shit on ice cream.”

  “What if I told you Isolde Balangie was being delivered to Mark Shondell?”

  “ ‘Delivered,’ like to be deflowered?”

  “I don’t think she’ll be working in the kitchen,” I said.

  I stood up and rattled the door for the screw. Marcel blew out his breath. “I need a sponsor if I’m gonna get out-of-state parole.”

  “I have a serious character defect, Marcel,” I said. “I don’t like people using me.”

  “Your mother probably got knocked up by a whiskey bottle, but you’re on the square. You know the people on the parole board.”

  “You need to rethink how you talk to other people, Marcel,” I said.

  “Come on, Dave. I’m telling you the troot’. I want to go straight.”

  “What’s the information?”

  “Sit down.”

  “No.”

  The room was growing hotter. I could smell his odor, the dirt and cotton poison, the sweaty socks that probably hung on a line in his cell and never dried, the fermented pruno that was a constant cause of inmate incontinence.

  “I ain’t asking much,” he said.

  I haven’t been honest. I wasn’t there out of humanity or duty. I was there because I wanted to believe that evil has an explainable origin, one that has nothing to do with unseen forces or even a cancerous flaw in the midst of Creation, and that even the worst of men could reclaim the light they had banished from their souls. I retook my seat. His eyes resembled hundreds of tiny blue-green chips of glass.