“Oh yeah, Clete told me.”
“Walk outside with me,” Clete said to Carroll.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Carroll said. “What the hell is going on?”
Clete went outside by himself and got in his Caddy.
“See you around, Mr. Robicheaux,” Dallas said.
“You, too,” I said.
Carroll sat down at the table. I wanted to take him apart.
“I saw Johnny Shondell, so cool your jets, Dave,” he said. “I couldn’t get cell service, so I motored on up the road.”
“You’re sure it was Johnny?”
“He was standing on Shondell’s deck, wearing shades and a Hawaiian shirt. He looked pretty relaxed.”
“You’ve got beer on your breath,” I said.
“You want me to bag ass, I’ll understand.”
“Get your act together, Carroll,” I said. “I’ll see you at the motel.”
“You trying to hurt me?” he said.
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I went outside and got in the Caddy. The top was up, the hand-waxed pink paint job sprinkled with leaves from the oak tree overhead.
“You don’t look too hot,” Clete said.
“You’re the best guy I’ve ever known, Clete,” I replied.
He started the engine, an unlit Lucky Strike hanging from his mouth. “Sometimes you truly perplex me, noble mon.”
* * *
THERE ARE EPIPHANIES most of us do not share with others. Among them is the hour when you make your peace with death. You don’t plan the moment; you do not acquire it by study. Most likely, you stumble upon it. It’s a revelatory moment, a recognition that death is simply another player in our midst, a fellow actor on Shakespeare’s grand stage, perhaps one even more vulnerable than we are, one who is unloved, excoriated, condemned to the shadows, and denied either rest or joy. John Donne went so far as to refer to this sad figure as “Poor Death.”
That evening I saw a transformation in the heavens that to this day I cannot explain. As I stood on a sand spit and watched the lights come on in the Shondell stilt house, the tide washing through miles of sawgrass, I realized the sky had turned a gaseous green, and the air had become as heavy and dense as a barrel of wet salt, the sun buried in a solitary cloud on the horizon, blood-red and flaming orange, like the inside of a torn peach.
As if on a panoramic movie screen, I saw Vikings slaying villagers with their axes, Richard the Lionheart’s Crusaders beheading Muslims on their knees, Buonaparte setting fire to a Russian village in the snow, the boys in butternut dropping like wheat on Cemetery Ridge, Comanche Indians dragging children with ropes through cactus, British tanks crashing down on a German trench at the Somme.
I saw the slaughter of the innocents at Nanking, Ernest Hemingway blown to shit in an Italian field hospital, Audie Murphy firing a fifty-caliber on top of a tank that was burning, James Bowie tossed on bayonets in the chapel at the Alamo, a navy corpsman pulling Clete down a napalm-scorched hillside on a poncho liner, and I saw myself calling in Puff the Magic Dragon on an Asian village, and maybe for the first time in my life, I realized the insignificance of my own death.
I also realized that the re-creation of my generation and era in the form of Isolde Balangie and Johnny Shondell was an innocent fantasy and a fitting tribute to the New Orleans Sound. The piano keys tinkling with a fragility like crystal, the throaty resonance of the saxophone, the muffled rolling of the drums, the coon-ass and Irish Channel accents of the vocalists, all of it echoing as though recorded in an empty college gym, all of it leading one day into Phil Spector’s Wall of Sound—this was the era that I always believed was the best in our history. But it was gone, and to mourn its passing was to demean it. The ethereal moment lives on in the heart, so what is there to fear?
I heard Clete behind me. “Ready to boogie?” he said.
“When you are,” I replied.
He was wearing his porkpie hat and a raincoat, his hands in the pockets. He looked at the waves sliding in with the tide; they were dark, laced with foam, filled with shell life. “Smell that air.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I got a feeling about something. We’re standing on the edge of creation. Or maybe the end of it.”