“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.”