A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  The clerk walked Clete to a room at the back of the motel and tapped on the door. When there was no answer, he stuck the key in the lock and twisted the knob and let the door swing open. The television was on, the sound off. Johnny was sitting in a chair, silhouetted against the screen, head on one shoulder. Clete stepped between Johnny and the clerk. “I’ll take it from here,” he said.

  “Is he all right?”

  “I’ll tell you if he’s not.” He put a ten-dollar bill in the clerk’s shirt pocket. “Thanks for your help.”

  After the clerk was gone, Clete shook Johnny by the shoulder. His eyes were half lidded and his mouth hung open. A syringe and the rubber tubing he’d used for a tourniquet lay on the carpet. His skin was pale blue, as though it had been refrigerated.

  Clete shook him again, harder. “Wake up,” he said.

  Johnny’s head sagged forward. Clete went to the phone. “No,” Johnny said.

  Clete replaced the receiver. “Look at me,” he said.

  Johnny raised his head and tried to speak. His words were in slow motion and seemed to break like bubbles on his lips.

  “How many times a day you shoot up?” Clete said.

  Johnny didn’t reply. Clete made sure the curtains were secure, then clicked on the overhead light. He pulled up Johnny’s sleeves and turned up his forearms.

  “You’re a pincushion, kid,” he said.

  “Not a kid,” Johnny said. “Need to sleep now.”

  “Where’s your stash?”

  Johnny closed and opened his eyes. “I don’t have any.”

  “I’m calling for an ambulance. I need to flush your stash.”

  Johnny bent over, then tried to roll himself out of the chair but obviously didn’t have the strength. “Narcan,” he said.

  “Where?”

  “The suitcase.”

  Clete took the suitcase off the baggage stand and dumped it on the bed. He picked through the folded shirts and trousers and underwear and socks and swim trunks and snorkel gear.

  “You can’t find it?” Johnny said.

  “Yeah, I can’t find it because it’s not there.”

  “Must have used it up.”

  “I hate dropping the dime on you,” Clete said, “but I don’t want to go to your funeral.”

  Johnny looked at Clete as though he were having a dream and Clete was not real. “I’ll go to Raiford.”

  “They don’t put people in Raiford for holding.”

  “I’m already on probation.”

  “Get up!” Clete said.

  “No.”

  “I’m taking you to the hospital. While you’re there, you’re D, D, and D. Got that?”

  “What?”

  “Deaf, dumb, and don’t know.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “Ready?” Clete said. He worked his arms under Johnny’s and lifted him from the chair. He could smell Johnny’s body odor, the funk in his breath, the cigarette smoke in his hair and clothes. Johnny’s tongue had turned gray. Clete lost his balance, and Johnny hit the floor on the base of his spine.

  “I’m sorry, kid,” Clete said. “I’m as fucked up as you are.”

  “No, you’re not. You’re a good guy,” Johnny said. “I got to get Isolde back, Mr. Clete.”

  Clete went to the phone and rang the desk. “Call an ambulance and tell them you got a code red.”

  He found Johnny’s stash of China white on the closet shelf. It was the size of a baseball and double-bagged in a Ziploc. Clete gathered up the syringe and the rubber tubing and a burned spoon he found on the lavatory, wrapped them in a towel and went outside and dropped them in a trash barrel, then walked out on the dock and shook the Ziploc empty over a passing wave. The white granules dissolved like snow on a woodstove. He looked at the horizon and thought he saw the Southern Cross pulsing in the heavens, but he knew it was impossible to see the Cross from this latitude and he wondered if he was becoming delusional. The wind was as warm as a wet kiss on his skin. Inside the hiss of the waves sliding through the pilings, he thought he heard wood knocking against wood, then the sound thinned and stopped when a wave smacked against a piling.

  He walked back to Johnny’s room. In the distance he saw the heavy, boxlike shape of an emergency vehicle coming down the two-lane, its flashers floating through the darkness as silently as tracer rounds. Why was the siren off? Why did he seem trapped under a black-green starlit Plexiglas dome, one that could suck the oxygen from his lungs? His father had died a wet-brain. Was it now his turn?

  * * *

  TEN MINUTES PASSED. Clete kept going to the window, trying to catch sight of the emergency vehicle he had seen. He had pulled back the covers on the bed, laid Johnny down and covered him up, then put his hand on Johnny’s forehead. His temperature felt normal and the color had started to come back in his face. Maybe I should cancel the 911, Clete thought. It was the kind of decision that nobody wants, but one that is forced regularly on the friends and families of addict-alcoholics. Every minute in an addict-alcoholic’s life is a roll of the dice: a blood clot in the brain, a seizure that leaves him frothing at the mouth on the floor, a handful of downers that reduces the heart to marmalade, an eruption in the stomach that causes him to strangle to death on his own vomit.

  Fuck it, Clete said to himself. Maybe the night clerk didn’t make the call. Clete picked up the phone and rang the desk. No answer. Great. He left the door cracked so he could get back in the room, and headed up the outside walkway. The wind was stronger now, sweet with the promise of rain, the streets empty and shiny with night damp. Directly overhead, a cloud bloomed with lightning that flickered and died.

  No one was at the counter. Clete patted the bell. “Hey, you back there? Where’s the meat wagon?”

  No response. Clete went behind the counter and into a back office. The bathroom door was ajar. “Hey!” he said.

  He pushed the door wider. The bathroom was clean, the seat up, the toilet bowl flushed. He went back through the office and saw a Styrofoam cup on the floor behind the desk, a thread of coffee leaking into the carpet.

  He went back to the counter and picked up the desk phone. Just as he began punching in the 911, he saw a black police cruiser turn off the street and drive through the porte cochere and circle to the back of the motel. Clete went outside and followed the cruiser to Johnny’s room. A large man in a fedora cut the cruiser’s headlights and engine but did not get out. Clete heard the squawk of a handheld radio. Clete walked to the driver’s window. It was already rolled down. The driver had a round, fleshy face with small eyes and gaps in his teeth like the carved mouth on a jack-o’-lantern. “You called in the 911?”

  “The clerk did,” Clete said, glancing at the emblem on the door. It was a dull bronze color, the kind that was hard to read against the black background and was used to nail speeders. “Where’s the ambulance?”

  “Ambulance?” the man said. “We got a disturbing-the-peace complaint.”

  “A kid overdosed,” Clete said. “He’s coming around. Maybe I can handle it.”

  “OD-ed on what?”

  “Unknown,” Clete said.

  The man got out of the cruiser and shut the door. His suit fit him like a tent. “What’s your name?”

  “Clete Purcel. I’m a PI from New Orleans.”

  “I’m Detective Bell. Let’s take a look at your friend.”

  “Can I see your shield?” Clete said.

  Bell wore a clip-on holster; there was a sag on the right side of his coat. “What’s this cruiser look like, a school bus?”

  “You’re a plainclothes responding to a disturbance report?”

  “A gas line blew up about a mile from here. I just got off my shift and volunteered to fill in. You smell like a cross between a beer vat and a rendering plant, sport. Want to drive your friend to the hospital or let me do my job?”

  “Sport?”

  Bell laughed to himself and studied his note pad. “I got a bad habit of giving people names. Your friend
is in room 136?”

  Clete nodded.

  “Stay behind me,” Bell said. He looked at the sky. “Strange weather, huh? One minute it’s balmy, then coconuts are coming down on your car. Purcel? Where did I hear that name? You haven’t been inside, have you?”

  “You mean in the joint?” Clete said.

  Bell kept walking and didn’t reply.

  “Hello?” Clete said at his back.

  “You look a little woozy. I hope you’re not planning on driving anywhere tonight. This is Monroe County. Heavy on family values. Kind of place that’s not DUI or spear-chunker friendly.”

  “What was that last part?”

  “I was pulling your leg. Had you going, didn’t I?”

  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 rese
mbled 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.