A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux 23)

“Don’t ever be afraid of men like Adonis Balangie,” I said.

“Something is happening inside me I don’t understand. It has nothing to do with Adonis.”

“You feel sick?” I said.

“It has to do with fire. It’s been in my dreams every night for a week. Fire on my legs and arms.”

Have you known people who stare into space and obviously see a dark place inside themselves rather than the external world? I’d like to say it was that simple with Leslie. But it was not. Her brow was not knitted; her eyes were calm rather than alarmed. I saw certainty in her face that I have seen only in people who are about to accept a terrible fate that has been unfairly imposed on their lives. I witnessed two electrocutions in the old Red Hat House at Angola. The men I watched die had that same look in their eyes.

Her stare broke. “I shouldn’t have said anything. You’ve been very kind. We need to go. Elizabeth needs to take her nap. Did you know that the hum of a car engine through the metal and seats is approximately in B-flat, the same as the hum of blood in the arteries of a pregnant woman? That’s why children sleep so easily in the backseat of an automobile.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said, in the way you speak to people with whom you must be very careful.

“Two days ago Adonis called and said the revelator is here. Adonis said a great change is at hand.”

I had learned long ago not to engage with either rhetoric or ideas that are dipped in fear, because the result is always the same: You don’t lessen the other person’s burden by one ounce, but you break your own back. “I’ll pay the check and have the waiter wrap our food,” I said. “I’ll meet you in the car.”

“Did I say something to affront you?”

“No, never,” I replied. “Look outside. The devil is beating his wife.”

“It’s raining while the sun is shining?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve never figured out how that expression came about. Do you know?”

But like most people preoccupied with an obsession, she had lost interest in the small talk of the day. I went to the register and waited while the waiter added up our ticket and put our food in Styrofoam boxes. Johnny and Isolde’s song ended, and the only sounds I could hear were the very fine chips of hail clicking on the roof and windows and a kitchen helper scraping dirty plates into a garbage pail, scowling at us as though we were directly responsible for his status in the world.

* * *

I DROVE UP THE two-lane road that followed Bayou Teche into Iberia Parish. For some reason I felt that the environment around me was changing, the same way the sea can transform itself without explanation, pulling the stars from the sky and lighting a groundswell that makes you feel you’re sliding down the shingles of the earth. Outside my windshield, the blend of winter-green trees and the camellia-petal softness of the season and the pink sun hiding behind the smoke from stubble fires had been replaced by a brass-like brilliance as harsh and cold to the eye as wind blowing across fountain water.

Maybe the distortion of the light had to do with the hailstones melting and sliding across my windshield. But that explanation was too simple. I felt as though I were seeing Eden on the first day of creation, before God’s hand had finished its work. I felt I was looking at a garden of thorns.

I looked in the rearview mirror. Elizabeth was asleep under a quilt, and Leslie was staring straight ahead as we passed a trailer slum in Jeanerette and rumbled across a drawbridge and passed two antebellum homes that could have been lifted out of Gone with the Wind.

“My,” she said.

“My what?” I said.

“They’re so white and beautiful, with the azaleas and hibiscus and hydrangeas blooming in front.”

To our left was Bayou Teche, running fast and flat, swollen with mud and storm debris and dented with raindrops in the sunlight, the glaze of the surface as bright as razors.

“The nuns are just down the road,” I said.

“I know what the dream was now. That’s how I died in an earlier time.”

“Dreams are dreams and should be treated as such,” I said.

“This is a haunted place, isn’t it? You see things here, things that aren’t real, don’t you?”

I did not want to talk about the supernatural with Leslie or anyone else. For the first time in my life, I had actually become afraid of it.

“Depends on how much guilt you have,” I said.

“I was burned at the stake,” she said. “For being a Jew.”

“Don’t do this,” I said.