A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  Clete leaned on his shovel. His clothes and boots were flecked with mud and wet sand. A blister had formed on his right hand. He had not uttered a word of complaint.

  “Let’s pack it up,” I said. “Sorry to get you out for this.”

  “At least we know LaForchette is probably telling the truth about the hit on the perv. Maybe one day somebody will dig him up. You know anything about him?”

  “I heard he was eccentric and moved to New Orleans. That’s it.”

  “There’s something I don’t get. LaForchette said the perv molested Adonis for five years?”

  “Right,” I said.

  “And in all that time Adonis didn’t say anything to his father, or his father didn’t know something was going on?”

  “Molestation victims blame themselves. Maybe Adonis was afraid of his father.”

  “There’s another possibility,” Clete said.

  “Don’t start thinking too deep on this,” I said.

  “Fathers rape their daughters, and the daughters are so confused they think they enjoy it. They think it’s a natural expression of their father’s love. Then when they realize it’s not, they get fucked up in the head and feel double the guilt. It’s the ultimate mind-fuck.”

  I looked at the sky. The stench of the burned garbage seemed worse. The clouds over the lake looked like they were weeping. “There’s something cursed about this place. Let’s get out of here.”

  “And go where?”

  “A diner. Shoot me the next time I drag you out of the sack on a Sunday.”

  “You got to keep a bright outlook,” he said. “Like when my ex dumped me for that phony Buddhist priest in Colorado who made his flock take off their clothes. I told her no hard feelings and gave the two of them my favorite toothbrush. You got to stay on the sunny side, noble mon.”

  * * *

  WE ATE HAMBURGERS at a truck stop outside LaPlace, where Kid Ory was born on Christmas Day in 1886. Why did I mention that fact? Because as Mr. Faulkner famously said, the past is always with us, and we can no more deny its presence than we can deny the dead who lie buried under our cane fields and golf courses and interstate highways, their mouths and eye sockets stopped with dirt, their identities and final words still hanging on the wind if we would only hear them.

  But Kid Ory was not on my mind. Clete was doing something at our table that I didn’t understand; simultaneously, he was receding to a place inside himself that had no sunny side. He had taken from his wallet the photo of the Jewish mother and her children who were walking to a gas chamber at Auschwitz, their shoulders hunched in the cold.

  I touched his forearm. “Maybe not dwell on that today, huh?”

  “Why not?”

  “Because you can’t change it.”

  “What kind of people would put children in a gas chamber?”

  I saw the waiter glance at us, then look away. I put down my hamburger and pretended I needed to use the restroom. When I returned to the counter, Clete had refolded the photo and placed it inside its pouch. But the pouch still lay on the counter next to his wallet.

  “You know some of Kid Ory’s recordings are on the jukebox here?” I said.

  “Yeah,” he said, looking at nothing.

  “What’s wrong, Cletus?”

  “Sometimes I think Nazis like Goebbels and Mengele are still out there, waiting for their time to come around again. I got this voice in my head that wakes me up in the middle of the night.”

  “It’s not just a bad dream?”

  “It tells me we’re supposed to stop something that’s about go down,” he said.

  “I think you’re flirting with depression,” I said. “It peels off a piece of your brain and gets inside you. You got to get outside of yourself, Clete. And don’t be telling anybody about voices in your head.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s a symptom of schizophrenia,” I said.

  “I’ve always had voices in my head,” he said.

  “So have I. That’s why I don’t tell anyone. It can get you locked up.”

  He pushed away his plate. “I got to get some air.”

  “Finish your hamburger. We’ll listen to a couple of Kid Ory numbers.”

  “I feel like the earth is dying,” he said. “What’s wrong with me, Dave?”

  * * *

  HE TOLD ME to drop him off at the apartment and office he owned in the Quarter. I tried to argue with him, but he said he had work to do for New Orleans’s most famous bondsmen, Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater, and he would see me in New Iberia during the week.

  “What about your Caddy?” I said. It was still in New Iberia.

  “I’ll get a rental.”

  Clete’s Cadillac convertible and his building in the Quarter were the only two indispensable material possessions in his life; along with his porkpie hat, his personae was incomplete without them. This was the first time I was truly worried about his state of mind.

  It was dusk when I drove away from his apartment. In the rearview mirror, I saw him struggling with the lock on the gate of his courtyard. I braked to the curb and started to back up. He must have seen my brake lights, because he waved me on, almost angrily, then raked the gate loose from the jamb and disappeared inside the shadows.

  I drove around the block. By the time I was in front of his building again, the lights were on upstairs. Nonetheless, I pulled to the curb. He opened the French doors onto the balcony and stepped outside. The sky was a deep purple, the Spanish ironwork on his balcony draped with bougainvillea and bugle vine.

  “What are you doing, Dave?” he called.

  “I’m starting a second career as a voyeur,” I replied.

  He shut the French doors and turned off the lights. I drove away, my heart sick.

  * * *

  I THOUGHT ABOUT GOING to a meeting of the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker group, but the problem on my mind was not booze or dry-drunking; it was Clete Purcel and the wheels that turned inside him.

  I had never worried about Clete going up against the Mob or corrupt cops or homicidal meltdowns who sang on their way to the injection table. (Do you know John Wayne Gacy’s last words to his executioners? “Kiss my ass.”) The real enemy in Clete’s life was Clete; his self-destructive powers were far greater than the ones he unleashed on his adversaries.

  Someone had figured out a way to get to him. The man in the cowl who had hung him from the wrecker had taken on mythic dimensions. Was he a religious fanatic? A common Sicilian gun-for-hire? Or a man whose progenitor had a triangular-shaped head and could have slithered from a tree in a Mesopotamian garden?

  I had no answer. Not about the man in the cowl, not about Clete, not about myself. The loss of a spouse, the depression that follows, the loneliness inside one’s home are not easy to bear. Fidelity to the dead is not only onerous; at four in the morning, it can be a bed of iron spikes.

  What am I saying? Every cop, either in plainclothes or in uniform, knows that eventually he will meet a vulnerable woman, perhaps a rape victim, a battered wife at a shelter, a survivor of a family catastrophe, a junkie hanging by a thread at the methadone clinic. Maybe the cop is well intentioned and tries to assure himself that he will not cross the line and violate his role as the knight errant in blue. But maybe the woman or girl is too helpless, too warm inside his arms, her face too beautiful to get out of his mind.

  I started to take I-10 through Baton Rouge to New Iberia, then swung off the exit into Metairie. A rainstorm had blown in from the Gulf, covering the moon and stars and sprinkling the asphalt with hailstones. By the time I reached Leslie Rosenberg’s house, the streets and rain ditches had begun to flood. I parked and ran for her porch, rain blinding me. When she opened the door, her face looked like it was caught in a strobe, bladed and unsure, as though she were entering a crossroads that had no traffic signals.

  “What’s the haps?” I said.

  * * *

  LESLIE WAS WEARING white shorts and sandals and an olive-green
T-shirt and had been doing exercises in front of the television when I rang the bell. Shane was playing on the television. I had not realized how tan and long Leslie’s legs were. They looked like they never ended.

  “I don’t want to ask,” she said.

  “Ask what?” I said.

  “Why you’re here.”

  “You told me to drop by sometime. Have you ever been a CI?”

  “A what?”

  “A confidential informant.”

  “Maybe my morals are tattered, but I’m not a rat, thank you very much.”

  Good for you, I thought. I looked at the television. “I love that film. The screenplay was written by A. B. Guthrie. He wrote The Big Sky. I met him in Montana.”

  “Go back to that CI stuff. You thought I’d sell out Adonis?”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t mean that at all.”

  She stepped closer to me. “Don’t lie.”

  “I’ve seen the devotion you have toward your child. You think that’s lost on me?”

  She seemed to take my measure. “You’re a funny guy for a homicide roach.”

  “Who told you I worked homicide?”

  “I asked around.”

  “Why would you do that?” I asked.

  “I don’t let everybody in my house. Want to watch Shane?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  We sat on the couch. Her daughter was asleep in her bedroom. The rain was thudding on the roof and the windows. The intensity of Shane is like no other western I have ever seen, including My Darling Clementine. In the last scene, set at dusk, the little boy Joey, played by the child actor Brandon deWilde, runs after Shane, calling his name plaintively. But Shane disappears into the shadows of the Grand Tetons, into an obscurity that makes you want to weep.

  “Wow,” Leslie said.

  “Yeah, there’s no film like it,” I said. “The story’s only historical equivalent is the biblical account of Eden. The sodbuster family builds a log house and a farm in a place that’s like the first day of creation. Good vanquishes evil, but you know that valley at the base of the Tetons will never be the same again.”

  She was looking at me with a strange expression.

  “I say something weird?” I asked.

  “I don’t get you.”

  “What’s to get?”

  “You show up in lightning and hail storms, then disappear. I don’t know what you want, but it’s something. You don’t want to get into my bread?”

  “Where did you get your vocabulary?”

  “At the convent. You got something bothering you?”

  “I lost my wife a while back.”

  “How far back?”

  “One day or one thousand. There’s no difference.”

  “I’m sorry. How’d she die?”

  “Lupus. I lost my previous wife to a pair of killers who used shotguns.”

  Leslie was quiet a long time. The rain was whipping across the windows. The image made me think of the scene in Shane when Alan Ladd is accused of cowardice at a meeting of sodbusters and he goes outside without replying and stands in the rain by himself, but only the little boy sees him.

  Leslie got up from the couch and turned off the television. She looked at me with one hand propped on her hip. “You think I’m coarse? Vulgar? Whatever?”

  “I think you’re admirable and brave. I think Adonis Balangie is a bum and has no business being around you. I’d better go. I’ve got to be at the department at oh-eight-hundred.”

  She seemed to study her hands. “You meant that about admirable and brave?”

  “You sell yourself short. It’d be an honor to be the lover of a woman like you.”

  “Say again?”

  “You heard me,” I said, getting up from the couch. “I’ve got to boogie.”

  “Stay for some ice cream.”

  “I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”

  “You called Adonis a bum. I know what Adonis is. The problem is me. I’m his whore.”

  “Don’t talk about yourself like that.”

  She stepped closer to me, breathing hard. I could feel her breath on my face. “I don’t have a way out.”

  “Just tell him to beat feet.”

  “And roll the dice with my daughter?” she said.

  “Don’t give up, Leslie. You’re one of the good guys. Do the short version of the Serenity Prayer: Fuck it.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  She sank her nails in the back of my neck and pulled my face to hers. But she kissed me only on the cheek, then walked into the kitchen and left me in a male condition I certainly didn’t need.

  “You coming?” she said from the doorway.

  I waited a few moments, then went into the kitchen and sat at the table while she filled two bowls of ice cream and sprinkled cinnamon on them.

  “I have a DVD of The Green Mile,” she said.

  “That’s a good one,” I said.

  “Let’s go back in the living room.”

  I cannot be sure of the events that followed. I remember her inserting the DVD into the player, and I remember eating the ice cream, then setting down the dish on the coffee table, the spoon clinking. I felt my head sink on my chest and heard the voices of the actors who played the guards at a Louisiana penitentiary. I heard the voice of the condemned Cajun about to be executed in the electric chair. I felt myself lean over sideways into a pillow, and then I felt Leslie’s fingers in my hair and on my neck and brow.

  But I was no longer in Louisiana. A dream, a door into a separate reality, or perhaps simply the exhaustion of the day had taken me back to the last scene in Shane, except I was the little boy running through the dusk calling Shane’s name. The mountaintops were purple, glistening with snow, and made me think of a woman’s breasts, and I found myself mounted on a horse that surged rhythmically under me, then a woman’s voice whispered wetly in my ear, her tongue touching the skin, I’ve waited for you a long time. I was born to be with you. Oh, oh, oh.

  I woke trembling, unsure of where and who I was.

  Chapter Nineteen

  THE WEEK WENT by without incident. Clete came back to New Iberia and spoke little of the unexplainable experiences we had shared. I said nothing about my visit to the home of Leslie Rosenberg. We were deep down in the fall now, hovering on the edge of winter, our two-lane back roads striped with impacted mud from the cane wagons on their way to the mills, the air cold and dense with an odor like brown sugar spilled on a woodstove.

  Late Saturday afternoon I drove to Henderson Swamp with my outboard and fished by myself in lily pads that had already stiffened and turned brown on top of the water. The western sun wobbled like a candle flame in the current flowing between the two willow islands where I was anchored. I was surrounded by miles of water, all of it dotted with flooded cypress trees and duck blinds and the remnants of abandoned oil platforms. There was not another boat in sight. I wore a canvas coat and an old fedora tied under my chin with a scarf, but just the same I could not get warm. Years ago I would have had a bottle of brandy in the bottom of the boat. Now I had a 1911 army-issue .45 in a zippered case tucked in my tackle box. Beside it I also had a drop, a five-shot .22 revolver cast from metal that was one cut above scrap.

  Why was I carrying a drop? Because ever since Clete and I had gotten involved with the Shondell and Balangie families, we had been confronted with situations and people and aberrant behavior that made no sense, and I believed that before it was over, we would experience much worse and that no one would ever accept the story we told about it. The oath we took, the laws we upheld, the justice system passed down to us by men such as John Adams and Thomas Jefferson no longer had application in our lives.

  I could feel the temperature dropping. I pulled the anchor and set it on the bow, dripping and muddy and tangled with hyacinth roots, and drove my boat deeper into the swamp. When I cut the engine and slung the anchor off the bow, I saw a shack nestled behind a flooded canebrake, the tin roof streaked
with moss and eaten with purple rust. The small gallery was supported by wood posts that were half submerged in the water.

  Two children of color were standing on the gallery. Both were barefoot and had blue eyes and light skin. The boy wore overalls that had only one strap, the girl a wash-faded dress that was as thin as Kleenex. A fog bank was puffing out of the willows onto the water.

  “Want to buy some worms?” the boy said.

  “I’m fishing for sacalait,” I said. I held up my bait bucket. “That’s why I have these shiners.”

  The faces of both children seemed hollowed out and lifeless, like apparitions in the mist. The interior of the shack was dark. There was no glass in the windows, no outbuilding on the bank, no boat tied to a post or a tree trunk, no parked vehicle nearby.

  “Where’re your folks?” I asked.

  “Out yonder,” the girl said.

  “Out yonder where?”

  She pointed. “Where the fog is at. They gone after a gator.”

  “The season is long over,” I replied. “Where do you keep your worms?”

  “Behind the shack,” the boy said. “Come see. We got big fat night crawlers.”

  The fog was wet on my neck, the breeze pushing the water under the shack’s gallery. “Aren’t y’all cold?”

  “No, suh,” the boy said.

  “Where do you live?”

  “Right here,” he said.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said. “Tell you what, I’ll take a look at those worms.”

  I used the paddle to push my way through the canebrake until the bow of my boat slid onto the bank. The fog was gray and thicker now and contained a smell like carrion or offal thrown on a fire. Behind me, I heard a splash I normally would associate with a gator slapping its tail on the water or a huge gar rolling in the hyacinths. When I looked back at the shack, the children were gone.

  I unzipped the .45 and took it from its case and put it in the right-hand pocket of my canvas coat. I put the drop in the left pocket and stepped onto the bank. The footprints of the children were clearly stenciled in the aggregate of mold and dirt and rainwater on the gallery. As soon as I stepped on it, my foot plunged through the boards as though they were rotted cork.