A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux 23)

“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?”