A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux 23)

Clete leaned on his shovel. His clothes and boots were flecked with mud and wet sand. A blister had formed on his right hand. He had not uttered a word of complaint.

“Let’s pack it up,” I said. “Sorry to get you out for this.”

“At least we know LaForchette is probably telling the truth about the hit on the perv. Maybe one day somebody will dig him up. You know anything about him?”

“I heard he was eccentric and moved to New Orleans. That’s it.”

“There’s something I don’t get. LaForchette said the perv molested Adonis for five years?”

“Right,” I said.

“And in all that time Adonis didn’t say anything to his father, or his father didn’t know something was going on?”

“Molestation victims blame themselves. Maybe Adonis was afraid of his father.”

“There’s another possibility,” Clete said.

“Don’t start thinking too deep on this,” I said.

“Fathers rape their daughters, and the daughters are so confused they think they enjoy it. They think it’s a natural expression of their father’s love. Then when they realize it’s not, they get fucked up in the head and feel double the guilt. It’s the ultimate mind-fuck.”

I looked at the sky. The stench of the burned garbage seemed worse. The clouds over the lake looked like they were weeping. “There’s something cursed about this place. Let’s get out of here.”

“And go where?”

“A diner. Shoot me the next time I drag you out of the sack on a Sunday.”

“You got to keep a bright outlook,” he said. “Like when my ex dumped me for that phony Buddhist priest in Colorado who made his flock take off their clothes. I told her no hard feelings and gave the two of them my favorite toothbrush. You got to stay on the sunny side, noble mon.”

* * *

WE ATE HAMBURGERS at a truck stop outside LaPlace, where Kid Ory was born on Christmas Day in 1886. Why did I mention that fact? Because as Mr. Faulkner famously said, the past is always with us, and we can no more deny its presence than we can deny the dead who lie buried under our cane fields and golf courses and interstate highways, their mouths and eye sockets stopped with dirt, their identities and final words still hanging on the wind if we would only hear them.

But Kid Ory was not on my mind. Clete was doing something at our table that I didn’t understand; simultaneously, he was receding to a place inside himself that had no sunny side. He had taken from his wallet the photo of the Jewish mother and her children who were walking to a gas chamber at Auschwitz, their shoulders hunched in the cold.

I touched his forearm. “Maybe not dwell on that today, huh?”

“Why not?”

“Because you can’t change it.”

“What kind of people would put children in a gas chamber?”

I saw the waiter glance at us, then look away. I put down my hamburger and pretended I needed to use the restroom. When I returned to the counter, Clete had refolded the photo and placed it inside its pouch. But the pouch still lay on the counter next to his wallet.

“You know some of Kid Ory’s recordings are on the jukebox here?” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, looking at nothing.

“What’s wrong, Cletus?”

“Sometimes I think Nazis like Goebbels and Mengele are still out there, waiting for their time to come around again. I got this voice in my head that wakes me up in the middle of the night.”

“It’s not just a bad dream?”

“It tells me we’re supposed to stop something that’s about go down,” he said.

“I think you’re flirting with depression,” I said. “It peels off a piece of your brain and gets inside you. You got to get outside of yourself, Clete. And don’t be telling anybody about voices in your head.”