A Private Cathedral

by James Lee Burke

  Johnny’s cottage was nestled among azalea bushes under a gnarled oak with limbs so big and heavy they touched the ground like giant elbows. By the tree was a stone bench green with lichen and age and the coldness that seemed to live permanently in the layer of leaves that had turned black and yellow and slick on the ground. The surroundings reminded me of the graveyard behind Father Julian Hebert’s church in Jeanerette, and I wondered if this was not perhaps a reminder of the tenuous grasp we have on our lives.

  I sat with Johnny on the bench. He was wearing an Australian infantry hat and a brown wool jacket zipped up to the throat, and in the dim light, he could have been one of the poor fellows in the trenches at Gallipoli waiting to go over the top into Turkish machine-gun fire, with the same dread of the grave, with the same heart-draining sense of abandonment.

  “How are they treating you, Johnny?” I said.

  “Fine,” he said, looking at the shadows.

  “When did you go on the spike?”

  “A year ago,” he said.

  “Why’d you do it?”

  “Probably the same reason people climb in a bottle.”

  “You wanted to?” I said.

  “Nobody held a gun on me.”

  “You’re looking good,” I lied.

  “Think so?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Where’d you get the digger hat?” He didn’t understand what I meant. “The Aussies call those ‘digger hats’ because the prospectors in the Outback wore them.”

  He took off the hat and brushed a strand of Spanish moss off the brim, then put it back on. “Maybe don’t tell anybody about this, huh?”

  “Your hat?”

  “Isolde sent it to me. There wasn’t a return address, but I know it was from her. She knew I wanted one.”

  “I’m at a loss about something, Johnny. Your uncle Mark has no feelings about others. Why cover for a man who has done such harm to you and Isolde?”

  “Uncle Mark is a man of destiny.”

  “What kind of destiny?”

  “He won’t say. Something big.”

  “Marcel LaForchette was a button man for the Balangie family; more specifically, he helped whack a child molester from New Iberia. I had the impression the molester might have been an employee or a member of your family.”

  “I don’t want you talking about the Shondells like that, Mr. Dave. Besides, why would Uncle Mark hire a guy who had killed one of his relatives?”

  Because Marcel LaForchette might end up a sack of fertilizer in your rose garden, I thought.

  “Know any revelators?” I asked.

  His face drained. “Where’d you hear about revelators?”

  “Know a guy named Gideon?”

  “Gideon Richetti?”

  “Yeah, that might be the guy.” I had no idea what Gideon’s last name was. “You’re buds with this character?”

  “Don’t do this to me, Mr. Dave. I’m already falling apart.”

  “My address was found in his room in the French Quarter.”

  Johnny’s lips were gray and chapped, his eyes lustrous, as though he had a fever. I could smell an odor rising from inside his shirt. “You have to get away from Gideon,” he said.

  “He’s a killer?”

  “He travels through time. He’s the guy who hung up Mr. Clete.”

  “Gideon is the guy who almost burned Clete to death?”

  “Yeah, what does it take to get that across?” Johnny said. He caught the tone in his voice and wiped his mouth. “I’ve been trying to tell you, Mr. Dave, but you don’t listen. Don’t mess with things you can’t understand. The same goes for Mr. Clete.”

  “Do you know how unhinged all this sounds?” I said.

  He lowered his head, his hands balled in his lap. I had made a mistake, one that in my case was inexcusable. Many people do not understand that drug and alcohol addiction are joined at the hip with clinical depression and psychoneurotic anxiety. The combination of the two is devastating. An outsider has no comprehension of the misery that a clinically depressed person carries. The pain is like dealing with an infected gland. One touch and the entire system tries to shut down, because the next stop might be the garden of Gethsemane.

  “You working the steps?” I said.

  “I’m trying to.”

  “You feel like you have broken glass in your head?”

  “I don’t know what I feel. I don’t feel anything.”

  “Here’s how recovery works, Johnny. When you dry out or get clean, you have memories that are like scars on the soul. You accept the things you did when you were high or drunk, so you feel like you’re living in a nightmare that belongs to someone else. In some ways, it’s like a soldier returning from war. He finds himself a stranger in the land he fought to protect. Except a drunk or drug addict gets no medals and has no honorable memories.”

  Johnny stared at the brick cottage he had been assigned. It was in deep shadow now, the windowpanes dark, faintly luminescent, like obsidian. “I brought my Gibson.”

  “Why don’t you get it?”

  He went inside and returned with his Super Jumbo acoustic guitar hanging from his neck. He sat down on the bench and made an E chord and rippled the plectrum across the strings. Then he sang “Born to Be with You” by the Chordettes. The driving rhythm of the music and the content of the lyrics were like a wind sweeping across a sandy beach. I don’t know how he did it. It was stunning to listen to Johnny sing it, because his voice, his lungs, and his heart seemed disconnected from the hollow look in his eyes. As I listened, I wanted to tear Mark Shondell apart.

  “That’s wonderful,” I said when he was done.

  “Think so?”

  “I don’t know if I’ve done you much good coming here,” I said. “But I want to leave you with a thought: Don’t be the dumb bastard I was.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Dave.”

  “Don’t let anyone take your first love from you. You’ll never forgive yourself. Steal her away or give up your life if you have to.”

  “Is that what happened to you?”

  “Mine to know and grieve on. I got to go,” I said. I stood up and placed my hand on his shoulder. “Watch your ass, kid.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  ONE WEEK LATER, Mark Shondell was back in town, perhaps with Isolde or perhaps not. People were afraid to ask. If you have not lived in a small Southern town or city, you will probably find this strange. But the greatest fear in our culture has always been deprivation. It trumps all the other sources of our discontent, including the racism that has been with us since Reconstruction. So maybe it seemed almost appropriate, considering the times in which we find ourselves, that Mark Shondell returned to New Iberia with a former Klan leader and neo-Nazi by the name of Bobby Earl.

  I do not mean to impugn Bobby. He had been with us a long time. He was not the problem. We were. He was the aggregate for everything that was wrong in us. Unfortunately, he was a master at making use of his perverse gifts to mesmerize a crowd and validate their barely concealed desire to do great physical injury to Jews and people of color. Women loved him, ignoring the fact that most of his facial features were the product of plastic surgery. Men did, too. He was a womanizer, an LSU graduate, and he attended all their home games. Invariably, he was interviewed in front of Tiger Stadium before the game, exuding an almost rapturous adoration of the Southeastern Conference because it was comprised entirely of Southerners, concluding for the television audience that no matter the numbers on the scoreboard, both teams were victorious. Bobby was a pioneer in the conflation of militarism, football, and evangelical Christianity. I wonder sometimes why his constituency has not raised a statue in his honor.

  His lies, his disingenuousness, the way he could create a tragic profile before a camera, like Jefferson Davis gazing upon the ruins of Richmond, were seldom if ever challenged, even by the media, because Bobby Earl was impervious to insult and, in reality, thrived upon it, floating above the fray like a phoenix above the
ash.

  He wore tailored three-piece gray suits like the one worn by Robert Lee during the surrender at Appomattox, although I doubted that Bobby had any grasp on the meaning of Lee’s last words when the old general suddenly woke on his deathbed and cried out, “Strike the tent and tell Hill he must come up.” I also doubted that Bobby Earl would enjoy marching up the slope at Cemetery Ridge with the boys in butternut, many of them barefoot and emaciated, tearing down fences in ninety-degree heat as they went, while Yankee grapeshot and canister and chain whistled in their midst and air bursts blew off the tops of their best friends’ skulls.

  Clete had been in New Orleans for five days. When he returned to New Iberia, I asked him to go to lunch with me at Bon Creole out on Old Spanish Trail. We ordered po’boy sandwiches and shrimp and sausage gumbo and iced tea, and while we waited for our order, I told him everything Johnny had said about the man named Gideon Richetti.

  “Johnny says that’s the guy who hung me upside down?” Clete said.

  “Yeah, but I came up with blanks,” I said. “There doesn’t seem to be any such guy anywhere. No sheet, no prints, nothing.”

  “He travels through time? What the fuck is that?”

  “Will you lower your voice?”

  “You went through NCIC?” he said.

  “Everywhere. The FBI, the state police, the state attorney’s office in Florida, John Walsh.”

  “Why him?”

  “He finds people nobody else can.”

  I could see Clete’s frustration. I was giving him information that was not information while calling to mind one of the worst experiences of his life.

  His gaze wandered around the room. There were antlers and deer heads and a marlin mounted on the walls. Then he looked out the window at a black Mercury with tinted windows that had just parked under a live oak. The waiter put our food on the table. Clete went to the window and came back. “If that guy comes in here, I’m calling the health department.”

  “What guy?”

  “Bobby Earl.”

  “Clete, if you get us kicked out of here—”

  “Don’t start,” he replied, popping open a napkin on his lap.

  “I mean it.”

  “The passenger window is down,” he said. “The Balangie girl is in the front seat. They don’t have the decency to bring her inside.”

  Bobby Earl and Mark Shondell came through the front door and got in the service line. All faces in the restaurant turned toward them. But in one second, with no change of expression, the same people looked quickly at their food or at their hands or at the deer heads and the marlin on the wall. Mark Shondell looked across the room at us and smiled, but I didn’t acknowledge him. He left the line and came to our table. His tan was darker than the last time I had seen him, his expensive clothes immaculate, not one hair out of place on his head. The jeweled rings on his fingers glinted under the ceiling lights. “It’s nice to see you, Dave,” he said, ignoring Clete.

  I didn’t answer.

  “Sir, did you hear me?” he said.

  “Yeah, I did,” I replied, looking through the window at the Mercury.

  “Then what seems to be your problem?”

  “Your treatment of Isolde Balangie,” I said.

  He looked over his shoulder, then back at me. “Her stomach is upset. She didn’t want to come inside.”

  “You’re molesting her, you son of a bitch.”

  The waiter and waitress and patrons became motionless, as though they were painted on the air. You could not hear a fork or spoon scrape against a plate or saucer.

  “How dare you,” he said.

  “Get away from our table,” I said.

  I doubted that Mark Shondell had ever been called to task in public. A single blue vein was throbbing in his left temple. “You will not speak to me like this.”

  “Don’t embarrass yourself any worse than you have,” I said.

  “Walk outside with me,” he said.

  “No, we’ll end this right here,” I said. I stood up, and with my open hand, I slapped him across the face as hard as I could, so hard his chin hit his shoulder.

  “Oh, shit, Dave,” I heard Clete whisper.

  I cannot tell you with exactitude what happened next. I felt as though I were standing in the middle of a dream from which I couldn’t wake. The other patrons were staring at their uneaten food. Bobby Earl slipped his arm inside Shondell’s. “Let’s go, Mark,” he said. “It’s all right. He’ll never be your equal.”

  He led Shondell outside in the silence.

  “How about those Saints?” Clete said to everyone in the room.

  No one laughed.

  * * *

  IT WASN’T OVER. I followed Bobby and Shondell into the parking lot. The sky was blue, the live oak above us full of wind. It was a grand day and should have been one of celebration, but I knew a couple of cruisers were probably on their way and that I didn’t have long before someone else took over the situation. Shondell was already in the backseat, and Bobby Earl was getting behind the wheel. I opened the passenger door. Isolde Balangie looked up at me. Her cheeks were pooled with color, her whitish-blond hair sifting on her face. She made me think of an abandoned doll.

  “Come with us, Isolde,” I said.

  “I’m with Uncle Mark,” she replied.

  “He’s not your uncle. He’s a pervert.”

  Shondell leaned forward so that his head was right behind Isolde’s. His features looked like an inverted triangle, one that was full of hate. “Be gone, you evil man.”

  “I’m going to get you, Shondell,” I said.

  “Your career is over,” he said. “You’ve slept with this poor girl’s mother, and you accuse me of moral turpitude? I’m going to expose you for the trash you are.”

  “Let’s go, Dave,” I heard Clete say behind me.

  “No,” I said. I picked up Isolde’s hand and held it in mine. “I visited Johnny at the treatment center. He was wearing the digger’s hat. He played his guitar for me. He loves you, Isolde.”

  Tears formed in her eyes. “I have to be with Uncle Mark,” she said.

  “Your mother doesn’t want you to do this,” I said.

  “She brought me here.”

  “I’ll have a talk with her about that,” I said.

  “Let go, Mr. Dave,” she said.

  I felt Clete’s hand on my arm. I stepped back and closed the door. Bobby Earl scoured gravel out of the parking lot onto the highway, the dust and exhaust and stench of the tires drifting into our faces.

  * * *

  AT TWO P.M. that same day, Carroll LeBlanc called me into his office. I suspected I had put my badge in jeopardy again, and I prepared myself for another onslaught of LeBlanc’s disdain and sarcasm. But I was about to learn again that people are more complex than we think. “What started it?” he said.

  “At Bon Creole?”

  “Oh, yes, could it be that?”

  “Mark Shondell is molesting a kid in plain sight,” I said. “That doesn’t bother you?”

  “Yeah, it does, so sit down and shut up a minute.” He propped his foot on the trash can and looked out the window at the grotto dedicated to Jesus’ mother. He glanced at his ever-present legal pad. “You popped Shondell in the face?”

  “I think that’s what happened. I had a blackout.”

  “You were drunk?”

  “I have blackouts without drinking. It keeps my bar tab down.”

  “What’s the deal with the Balangie girl? Don’t tell me human trafficking, either.”

  “That’s what this is about—human bondage.”

  He rubbed his mouth. “Yeah, there’s predation involved, but it’s in-house stuff between the greaseballs. I just don’t get the trade-off.”

  “What do you mean, trade-off?”

  “What is Adonis Balangie getting out of this? How about the mother? You’re getting in her bread, right? What does she have to say about her daughter?”

  “Carroll, I believe you come
from another planet. Maybe another galaxy.”

  “Stop being so sensitive. If I had my way, I’d be up her dress, too. Does Adonis Balangie know what y’all are doing?”

  “I’m not doing anything.”

  “I got to give it to you, that broad’s ass ought to have its own zip code.”

  “I’m about to leave your office, Carroll.”

  He dropped his foot from the trash basket and held up his hands. “All right, that’s a little crude. What’s really going on between the Balangie family and the Shondells?”

  “I think it’s about money.”

  “That simple, huh?”

  “Not quite,” I said.

  “What’s the rest of it?” he said.

  “Johnny Shondell says there’s a player who travels through time.”

  “Anyone local?”

  “Talk to Clete Purcel.”

  “In your dreams.”

  “I’ll see you later, Carroll.”

  “Unfortunately,” he said.

  I started to leave.

  “Hold up,” he said.

  “What is it?” I said irritably.

  “You really smacked Shondell across the face? Not just a tap? You let that prissy cocksucker have it?”

  “Afraid so.”

  He looked at me as though seeing me for the first time. “You’re a motherfucker, Robo.”

  * * *

  THAT EVENING I sat at the picnic table in the backyard and fed my cats and two raccoons and a possum who carried her babies on her back and invited herself to a free meal whenever she had the opportunity. If you’re given to depression, the fading of the day can seep into your soul and bind your heart and shut the light from your eyes. During those moments when I’m tempted to let my thoughts be drawn into the great shade, I seek out the company of animals and try to take joy in the transfiguration of the earth as the sun’s afterglow is absorbed into the roots and trunks of the trees and the clumps of four-o’clocks and the Teche itself at high tide, when the light is sealed beneath the water and shines like rippling gold coins in the current.