A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  He felt the winch jerk, then lower him to the ground. He wondered if a deliverance was at hand or if another trick was about to be played upon him. The fog was so white and thick that he wanted to stay inside it forever and float out to sea, far beyond the horizon, and stay in the company of whoever had touched his eyes and brow. He wondered if that had been his mother. Who else could it have been? He was curled like a broken worm on the ground. He could hear feet crunching on the sand and shale, walking toward him, as loud and metronomic and heavy as the blood drumming inside his head.

  Don’t do this to me, he said to someone. Please.

  The words did not sound like his.

  Chapter Thirteen

  JOHNNY SHONDELL SET down the fire extinguisher he was carrying and took out a pocketknife and knelt on one knee and sliced the ligatures on Clete’s wrists. The butt of a small semi-automatic protruded from the pocket of his jeans. He looked into Clete’s face. “You all right, Mr. Clete?” he said.

  “No,” Clete said. “I don’t think I’m ever going to be all right. What happened?”

  “I know some of the places they use. So I came here.”

  “Who’s ‘they’?”

  “You don’t want to find out.”

  Clete shook his head. “This isn’t real.”

  Johnny put his hand under Clete’s big arm and helped him to his feet. “Get all these memories out of your mind. There’s a world around us other people can’t see. You and Mr. Robicheaux found your way into it. That was a mistake. You got to undo the mistake. You hear me, Mr. Clete?”

  “I’m not going to put up with this greaseball craziness, Johnny.”

  “What day is it?”

  Clete had to think. He had flown into Lauderdale on Friday. “Saturday morning.”

  “It’s Monday,” Johnny said.

  “It can’t be.”

  “It is,” Johnny said.

  “How’d I lose two days?”

  “Maybe they used drugs on you. Maybe they didn’t need drugs. They have powers we don’t understand. The only thing they fear is discovery.”

  “What?”

  “They’re always out there. They don’t want people to know they exist. There’s good ones and bad ones.”

  “Cut that out. What’s this place we’re in?”

  “A junkyard.”

  Clete started to shiver. The sky was still black, the rain still falling, twisting like drops of crystal. “You got a car?”

  “A rental.”

  “What about the cop who hit me with a blackjack?”

  “I don’t know anything about a cop.”

  “He was plainclothes,” Clete said. “He came to your motel room.”

  “I don’t remember that,” Johnny said.

  “We’re going to hunt down this guy and find out who he’s working for.”

  “No, we’re not.”

  Clete felt his legs going weak. His head began to spin, as though he were still suspended from the cable. His throat had never been so dry, even after weekend benders. Johnny steadied him with one hand. “My car is over here, Mr. Clete. I’m going to take you back to the hotel.”

  Clete looked at the southern horizon. The waves were rolling out of the Straits, dark green and capping and glazed with the moon’s reflection. “What happened to the ship? The one with the masts and oars.”

  “You’re not making sense. Oars on a sailboat? That doesn’t sound right.”

  “It looked like it was out of medieval times.”

  “Don’t think about these things anymore, Mr. Clete. You can’t talk about this to others, either. The more you do, the more people will not believe you. You see any of their faces?”

  “Yeah, the cop and the guy in a hood.”

  “What’d the guy in the hood look like?” Johnny asked.

  “Not human.”

  “That’s what I’m saying. Don’t talk about any of this. People will try to put you away. Most people don’t want the truth.”

  Clete wiped the rain out of his eyes. His skivvies were translucent, his skin blue. He let Johnny help him to the rental car. For the first time in his life, he believed that madness might be the norm and that his own mind might become his greatest enemy.

  * * *

  CLETE SPENT THE next two days in Fort Lauderdale, then flew back to New Orleans and drove to New Iberia in his Caddy. In the meantime I had gotten my badge back and was hoping to put to rest my involvement with the Shondell and Balangie families.

  Of course, that’s not the way things worked out. Clete hit town a nervous wreck. We were sitting at the redwood picnic table in my backyard when he told me what happened in the Keys. The cicadas were droning in the trees. But I could hardly hear them because of the popping sounds Clete’s words left in my ears. I thought he had finally lost his mind.

  “Johnny Shondell showed up in the junkyard with a semi-auto?” I asked.

  “He said he carried it in his guitar case.”

  “Like that’s what all musicians do?” I said.

  He didn’t answer. He stared at a blue heron that was standing in the lily pads on the edge of the bayou, pecking at its feathers.

  “You couldn’t find the plainclothes who sapped you?” I said.

  “The city and county guys said there was no one fitting that description in their departments.”

  “How about the motel clerk who made the 911 call?”

  “He blew town.” Clete gazed at the shadows under the trees as though the light were shrinking from the world.

  “Stay here,” I said.

  “Where you going?”

  “You need something in the tank.”

  “You got a shot of Dr. Jack stashed away?”

  Sometimes I kept booze in the house. Or guests left it there. That might seem a funny admission from a recovering drunk, but the problem is in the man, not the bottle. If a drunk wants booze, he’ll burn down the liquor store to get it. For guys like Clete or me or anyone who shares our metabolism, alcohol and heroin are chemically synonymous, and the temptations are everywhere. A normal person cannot understand the longing a drunk feels for his glass. It is stronger and worse than any sexual desire, any fear of hell, any allegiance to family, country, or church.

  I fixed a glass of iced tea and a ham-and-onion-and-avocado sandwich and brought them to him on a tray. I thought he’d be irritable because I didn’t bring him four fingers of Jack on the rocks or at least a beer. But he didn’t complain. I think Clete knew he was teetering on the edge of a breakdown. You’ve heard of the thousand-yard stare? His hands were shaking on his sandwich as though he had a chill.

  “We’ve been in rougher spots,” I said.

  “When?”

  “Where’s Johnny now?”

  “Back in town. Probably at his uncle’s. I can’t trust my own thoughts. I think I’m going crazy, Dave.”

  “You saw the ship out on the water, the one with the oars?”

  “The one we’ve both had dreams about. Explain that to me.” He grasped his stomach. “I feel sick.”

  “I need to make a phone call,” I said. “Don’t go anywhere.”

  The air smelled cold and tannic, and the sun was red yet gave no heat. I went inside the house and called Father Julian.

  * * *

  WE DROVE IN my pickup to Julian’s cottage down Bayou Teche just outside of Jeanerette. The sun was barely a spark in the west, the sky the color of a bruise. The lights were on in the cottage, the church dark. Clete and I got out of the truck and started toward the cottage. Someone was banging on the church roof. Clete stared at a figure silhouetted against the sunset. “What’s he doing here?”

  “Good question,” I said. I walked to the base of a ladder propped against the church’s eave, then climbed far enough to see a man with a face like a dehydrated prune hammering nails in a sheet of corrugated tin, his knees spread like a jockey’s on the roof’s spine.

  “Hey, Marcel,” I said. “You helping out Father Julian?”

&nbs
p; “No, I’m vandalizing the roof of his church,” he replied.

  “You’re doing a good deed. You’re a stand-up guy.”

  “If that’s Pork Butt Purcel I see down there, tell him I said eat shit.”

  “What do you have against Clete?”

  “He’s on the planet. That’s enough.”

  “You never disappoint, Marcel,” I said, climbing back down the ladder. I rejoined Clete.

  “What did LaForchette have to say?” he asked, still staring at Marcel’s silhouette, an unlit cigarette hanging from his mouth.

  “He’s at war with the world,” I said.

  “What a joke,” he said.

  “Pardon?”

  “That crazy fuck is the world, Dave.”

  Father Julian opened the screen door onto his small gallery. He was wearing sandals and elastic-belted khakis and a yellow T-shirt with Mickey Mouse’s face on it. In his hand he had a magnifying glass, the one he used when he worked on his stamp collection, which was extensive and the secular love of his life. “Come in and tell me what all this is about,” he said.

  “I don’t know if you’re going to be up to it, Julian,” I said.

  “It can’t be that bad, can it?”

  “Wait and see,” I replied.

  * * *

  CLETE NARRATED EVERYTHING that had happened in Key West, starting with Johnny Shondell’s overdose in the motel room and the plainclothes cop who’d clocked him with a blackjack. Up to that point, there was nothing surprising about the narrative, considering the source. In fact, Father Julian seemed to be nodding out. Then Clete told of awakening upside down in his skivvies and discovering that he was about to be burned alive by a figure whose face seemed less than human while, offshore, a multitiered vessel that resembled a medieval prison ship lay at anchor.

  “This guy had on a cowl, you say?” Julian asked.

  “Yeah,” Clete said.

  “So maybe the shadows created an effect you can’t be sure about?” Julian said.

  “No, that’s not it,” Clete replied. “He looked exactly like I said. Here’s the rest of it. He could see into my head. He knew about an incident in my childhood I never talk about. I busted up a greenhouse behind a lady’s house in the Garden District. He taunted me with it like he was my father talking to me.”

  “I don’t have an explanation, Clete.”

  “The guy was going to burn me upside down. Dave says that means something.”

  Julian’s eyes looked haunted. “It’s the way Giordano Di Betto died.”

  “Penelope Balangie’s ancestor?” Clete said.

  “Yes,” Julian said, his voice solemn and dry.

  “Then this fog blew in, with hail and thunder and rain,” Clete said. “It saved my life. I felt like a woman was stroking my eyes and brow.”

  “I’ve got to stop you here,” Julian said.

  “What’d I say?” Clete said.

  “You said nothing wrong. But I have no knowledge about these things. They’re frightening in their aspect. They’re frightening in what they suggest.”

  “How you mean?” Clete said.

  “It’s too easy to get lost in the images you describe. How do people explain Auschwitz? They blame it on the devil. I don’t buy that. There’s enough evil in the human heart to incinerate the earth.” His cheeks were pooled with color, his nostrils white around the edges, as though he had been breathing the air in a subzero locker.

  “I’m not getting you,” Clete said.

  “There’s a good chance you were drugged,” Julian said. “Don’t give supernatural powers to these men. They have none. They live under logs.”

  Clete looked away, obviously disappointed in the way the conversation was going. “I think you’re slipping the punch, Father,” he said.

  “You’re probably right,” Julian said. “I hate the cruelty that lives in us. I think about Joan of Arc and the way she suffered, and I want to weep.” He picked up his magnifying glass and looked through it, one eye swelling to bulbous proportions. “I get carried away. I mentioned Auschwitz. I went on a tour there. I thought I heard people crying in one of the rooms. There was a vice president of a midwestern university in our tour group. He said, ‘I know this sounds bad, but what a masterpiece of administration.’ I wanted to beat him with my fists.” Julian set down his magnifying glass and stared at the rug.

  “We saw Marcel LaForchette up on the roof,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Clete said. “He’s quite a guy. You might keep a high-tech lock on the poor box.”

  “He’s a sad man,” Julian said.

  “His victims might argue with that,” Clete said.

  “You’re a tough sell, Clete,” Julian said. “I wish I could be of more help. The truth is I don’t have answers to much of anything.”

  “You’ve been very helpful, Julian,” I said.

  “Good try,” he said.

  We said good night and went outside into the dark. It wasn’t a good moment. There are situations for which no one has a solution, and it’s unfair to push the burden upon people who are unprepared to deal with it. I looked up at the church roof. Marcel LaForchette was gone. I felt awful about Julian. I suspected he would not sleep that night.

  I heard the screen door open again. I turned around and saw Julian silhouetted in the doorway. “Dave, could I speak to you a minute?” he said.

  “Go on. I’ll be in the truck,” Clete said.

  I walked back to the gallery.

  “There are times when I fail,” Julian said. “This is one of them.”

  “None of this is your fault. Clete and I got into this on our own.”

  “There’s something I need to tell you. It has nothing to do with anything Marcel told me inside a confessional. He says Mark Shondell is part of a group that plans to stir up hatred toward minority people on a national scale.”

  “I never thought Shondell was political.”

  “For Mark Shondell, politics and money are interchangeable. He’s the lowest form of humanity I’ve ever known.”

  I had never heard Julian speak of someone in that way.

  “Shondell is going to undo the Civil Rights Act?” I said, trying to smile.

  “Do you know how many people secretly wish that were the case?” he said. “I’m going to have a drink now. Probably more than one. Take care of yourself, Dave. And take care of Clete most of all.”

  He latched the screen but continued to look through it as we turned around in the yard and headed back to New Iberia. Moths were clustered like wet chicken feathers on the electric light above his gallery.

  * * *

  ONE WEEK LATER, the sheriff’s department merged with the Iberia City Department and moved into City Hall, a lovely two-story building on the Teche with a reflecting pool in front and a long semicircular driveway shaded by live oaks. The driveway stayed in deep shadow and led past the library and a grotto dedicated to Jesus’ mother. On the other side of the grotto was a canebrake and a Victorian home that once was the residence of Joel Chandler Harris, the former Confederate officer best known for his Uncle Remus and Brer Rabbit stories and his passionate concern for people of color.

  My office was on the second floor of the building on the Teche. I loved walking down East Main to work, in the shadows of the massive oaks up and down the street, and picking up my mail and pouring a big cup of coffee and taking the stairs to my office and sitting behind my desk, and gazing out the window at the camellias blooming on the far side of the bayou and the urban forest that comprised City Park.

  Clete had gone back to New Orleans to take care of his office on St. Louis Street in the Quarter, and I tried to concentrate on the good things in my life and let go of the things I couldn’t control. Our recent election of a sheriff was still in chaos, but in the state of Louisiana, chaos is more the norm than an anomaly. In the meantime, we were stuck with a pro tem sheriff. Guess who that was?

  Carroll LeBlanc came into my office on a sun-spangled morning when God seeme
d in His heaven and all was right with the world. “Tell me your secret,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “Uptown cooze on the hoof.”

  “Sorry, that went right past me.”

  “This particular uptown cooze drives a maroon Ferrari. My hat is off to you, Robo, but I don’t want you dragging your private shit into the department.”

  I tilted back in my chair and swiveled it so I could gaze at the bayou and the park and not look at LeBlanc. “It’s a bluebird day,” I said. “You could strike a match on the sky.”

  “Do you have a hearing problem?”

  “Nope, I hear just fine.”

  He walked behind my desk and interdicted my line of sight. “I’m talking about Penelope Balangie, who happens to be the wife of Adonis Balangie.”

  “What’s the news on Ms. Balangie?”

  “She was here yesterday afternoon. Looking for you.”

  That one got to me. But I kept my face empty. “You took a message?”

  “I don’t take messages. I’m the sheriff.”

  “I don’t know what to tell you about Penelope Balangie, Carroll. Why don’t you talk to her? Talk to Mark Shondell also. The issue is human trafficking.”

  “You got something going with that bitch?”

  I stood up and looked down on the bayou and the sun’s reflection wobbling under the surface. “You got a problem, bub.”

  “What did you call me?”

  I looked him in the face. The line of moles under his left eye resembled a string of black insects; there was dried mucus at the corner of his mouth. I could smell his deodorant. “You have sex on the brain,” I said. “Either get your ass out of my sight or get your ashes hauled. I don’t care which.”

  “I can have you up on insubordination.”

  “Do it.”

  He wore a polyester navy blue suit that looked like it had grease in it, and a gold tie and a white dress shirt with tiny silver fleurs-de-lis. His right hand was clenching at his side. “Maybe I should pop you right here.”