A Private Cathedral (Dave Robicheaux 23)

“Those definitions are relative.”

“How so?”

“In Vietnam, after you called upon Puff the Magic Dragon, did you feel pride as flames leaped from the straw homes of peasants who harvested rice with their hands? Did their screams fill you with glee? Did you smile upon your work to see?”

> I dropped the phone and lost my balance and fell on one knee when I tried to pick it up.

Chapter Thirty

AT ELEVEN THAT night I walked along the edge of the Teche to a live oak that was over two hundred years old, not far from the old Burke home. It was here, on V-J Day in 1945, that I first fished with my father. He was a huge, illiterate man who fought in saloons for fun and racked pipe on the monkey board high above a drilling rig on the Gulf of Mexico, under the stars, the wind in his face, the waves crashing below, fearless unto the day the drill punched into an early pay sand and the casing blew out of the hole and Big Aldous Robicheaux clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo line and leaped into the dark, never to be seen again.

But I no longer dwelled on the tragedy of my father and mother, and the deprivation and violence and loneliness that defined their lives. Rather than thinking of Big Aldous’s last moments sliding down the guy wire as the rig melted and toppled with him, I thought of this spot on the bayou where he taught me how to fish. He had bought me a cane pole and a balsa-wood bobber and a weight fashioned out of a perforated .36-caliber lead ball he bought from a colored man for twenty cents. It was a fine gift to receive, but I could catch no fish with it, although I baited the hook first with crickets, then night crawlers, and finally red wigglers.

In my disgust, I swung the weight, the hook, and the bobber out in the center of the lily pads and fouled the hook in the roots below. I was ready to throw my pole in the water. Big Aldous was smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, blowing the smoke into the wind. He flicked the cigarette in the bayou. “Don’t be getting mad, no,” he said. “You got to outt’ink the fish, you.”

I was lost.

“See, you done put your hands on the bait, Davie,” he said. “The fish can smell you. So you got to change the smell.”

“How do I do that?” I said.

“Spit on your bait. What you t’ink?”

I lifted the poor drowned worm on my hook from the water and spat on it, then swung over the current. The bobber floated downstream about one foot and plunged out of sight. I pulled up the cane pole with such violence that I broke it in half and flung a goggle-eye perch into a limb above my head. My father had to borrow a rake from the Burke home and comb the fish out of the tree.

I don’t mean to tire others with this account. But everyone has a private cathedral that he earns, a special place to which he returns when the world is too much late and soon, and loss and despair come with the rising of the sun. For me it was the little dry mudbank on which I now stood, the tide rippling past me, the ducks murmuring and ruffling their wings among the cattails and flooded bamboo.

Then a giant wobbling soap bubble of incandescence descended on the bayou, bent and distorted, metamorphic, its colors changing from pink to yellow and red and pink again, as though it were swirling with fire that contained no heat. In the center was the galleon Clete and I had seen before, the oars dipping into the Teche, but this time Gideon was standing in the bow, beckoning. “Don’t be afraid,” he called.

“No, I will not board your ship, sir,” I said.

“You must.”

“I came as you asked,” I said. “Please do not act in an authoritarian fashion.”

A boarding hatch opened on the gunwale, and a ramp slid from the deck to the bank. I found myself drawn up the ramp, inside the bubble, the light as tangible as tentacles on my skin.

Gideon was not wearing a cowl. His tiny ears and nose and the reptilian tightness of the skin on his face and skull were frightening.

Down below, between the hull and the deck on both sides of the ship, were row after row of men chained to their benches and oars, some dozing with their heads on their chests, others with the expressions you would associate with infants ripped from their mothers’ grasp.

In the midst of the oarsmen sat Jess Bottoms, his feet bare, chains attached to his wrists and ankles. His hair was barbered and his clothes were clean. His face was stupefied. He was examining his chains as though he could not understand their presence on his body.

“Sometimes decades pass before these fellows know where they are,” Gideon said. “In reality, all of us are outside of time. There is no past, present, or future. The future you and Mr. Purcel have is already taking place. It will just take a little while for you to find your way to it.”

“I don’t wish to talk about the future,” I said. “I don’t want to be on board your ship, either.”

“You’re just a visitor, Mr. Robicheaux. People such as you don’t make the cut.”

“Then why am I here?”

“I need you to help me.”

“Sir?”

“I was used to kill many people. I have no peace. The one I grieve over most is Leslie Rosenberg. She was totally innocent of any crime. I hate what I have done.”

“Any crimes you have committed were done with your own consent. I suggest you lose the ashes-and-sackcloth routine.”