“Can you get in touch with him?”
“A guy who wants to kill me?”
“How about cooling it on the irritability?” I said.
“Dave, you’re not hearing me. Pickins is the bottom of the septic tank. Whoever hired him did it because he’s a sadist and bat-shit crazy. He’s also disposable. Know what I think?”
“No.”
“If Delmer Pickins is our guy, he’s after both of us. Or the guy who hired him is.”
I knew where Clete was going, but I didn’t say anything.
“I know Adonis Balangie and Mark Shondell would like to take you off at the neck,” he said. “You got it on with Adonis’s wife—sorry, his companion he never sleeps with—and with his regular punch who he bought a house for. You also took time out to slap Mark Shondell’s face in public.”
“So I’m the one to blame?”
“You didn’t let me finish. I think this is about money. Or power. Adonis isn’t going to hire an ignorant peckerwood like Pickins. This Confederate-statue stuff is the issue. Look, Eddy Firpo had neo-Nazis in his house. Mark Shondell is an elitist and closet racist if I ever saw one. We’re living in weird times, Streak. I bet forty percent of the country wouldn’t mind firing up the ovens as long as the smokestacks are blowing downwind.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“What, about the Herd?”
“Yeah. People are better than that.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” he said.
He got up from the bed and opened the icebox. He pulled out two cans and threw one to me. It was a Diet Dr Pepper. He popped his can and drank from it. “You know how many times you’ve said maybe the South should have won the Civil War?”
“I wasn’t serious.”
“You fooled me. Come on, noble mon. You hate political correctness as much as I do. How about the poor fuck who lost his job because of affirmative action? Here’s a guy who gets a bolt of lightning in the head because of somebody else’s mistakes.”
“I’m the target because of my influence on Johnny Shondell?” I replied.
“No, because you’re intelligent and you’ll give Shondell a hard time politically. Not many people can do that. Plus, he’s a scorpion.”
I sat down next to Clete on the bed. I hadn’t opened my cold drink, and I set it on the night table. I feared for Clete. I was protected by the culture of law enforcement, one that is ferociously tribal in nature. Clete was a disgraced cop, a lone soul sowing destruction and chaos everywhere he went, and hated by the Mob and NOPD. I felt his eyes on the side of my face.
“So why would Shondell send a hitter after you?” I said.
“To get me out of the way so they can go after you unhampered.”
“I think it’s more complicated than that,” I said. “Gideon was sent to burn you alive, Clete. Now this creep Pickins is in town. It’s you they’re after. There’s something in you that’s a threat to them. We just don’t know what it is.”
“Yeah, they’re jealous of my waistline. Where do you dig up this stuff, Dave?”
That was Clete, never able to understand the repository of virtue that lived inside him. He went to the sink and poured his Dr Pepper down the drain. “I’ll get some sheets and a blanket for the couch. You need to get some rest, noble mon. We’ll watch a film. I just rented The Passion of Joan of Arc, made in 1928. I’ve seen it three times. God, that girl was brave.”
* * *
MOST NEUROSCIENTISTS BELIEVE that 95 percent of the human mind is governed by the unconscious. I believe them, because that is the only way I have ever been able to understand the behavior of my fellow man. Jonathan Swift said man was a creature “capable” of reason. I think he had it right. I believe that most human activity is not rational and is often aimed at self-destruction. I also believe that ordinary human beings will participate in horrific deeds if they are provided a ritual that will allow them to put their conscience in abeyance.
I have many memories I can suppress during daylight but which come aborning at night: a battalion aid station in a tropical country, helicopter blades thropping overhead, the raw smell of blood and feces, a man calling for his mother, his entrails blooming from his stomach as though it had been unzipped. The garish images from the aid station are to be expected. But I have another kind of dream, one that frightens and depresses me far more than my experiences in Vietnam.
I witnessed two electrocutions in the Red Hat House at Angola Prison, in both cases at the request of the condemned. The building was constructed in the 1930s to house the most dangerous convicts on t
he farm. They wore filthy black-and-white-striped uniforms and red straw hats and worked double time on the levee under a boiling sun from first bell count until lockup. More than a hundred convicts were buried in that levee, some of them shot just for the amusement of a notorious gun bull.