A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux 23)

“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.

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.