Creole Belle (Dave Robicheaux 19)

Beginning perhaps in the 1970s, Pentecostal and fundamentalist religion took on a new life and began to grow exponentially in southern Louisiana. There are probably numerous explanations for the phenomenon, but the basic causes are rather simple: the influence of televised religion that was as much entertainment as it was theology; and the deterioration of the Acadian culture in which my generation grew up. In the 1950s courthouse records were still handwritten in formal French, and Cajun French was spoken almost entirely in the rural areas of the parish; in cities like Lafayette or New Iberia, perhaps half of the population spoke French as their first language. But during the 1960s, Cajun children were not allowed to speak French on school property, and the language that Evangeline and her people brought with them from Nova Scotia in 1755 fell into decline and became associated with ignorance and failure and poverty. The fisher-people of southern Louisiana became ashamed of who they were.

My experience has been that when people are frightened and do not understand the historical changes taking place around them, they seek magic and power to solve their problems. They want shamans who can speak in tongues, even Aramaic, the language of Jesus. They want to see the lame and the blind and the incurably diseased healed onstage. They want the Holy Spirit to descend through the roof of the auditorium and set their souls on fire. And they want a preacher who can pound a piano like Jerry Lee Lewis but sing gospel lyrics written by angels. The blood of Christ and the waters of baptism and the hypnotic rant of a clairvoyant all become one entity, a religion that has no name and no walls, a faith you carry like a burning sword, one that will cause your enemies to cower.

There’s an admission price in this church, but contrary to popular belief, it’s not always monetary. That night Clete Purcel and I drove to the Cajundome and entered the throng working its way through the front doors. Almost all the seats had been taken. The overhead lights created an iridescent sheen above the crowd, which was buzzing like a giant beehive. When Amidee Broussard took the stage, the reaction was electric. The crowd clapped and stomped their feet and laughed as though an old friend had returned to their midst with glad tidings.

I had to hand it to him. As a speaker, Amidee was stunning. There was an iambic cadence in all his sentences. His diction and voice were as melodic as Walker Percy’s or Robert Penn Warren’s. He made people laugh. Then, without seeming to shift gears, he began to speak of Satan and the apocalyptic warnings in the book of John. He spoke of lakes of fire and halls of torment and sinners impaled like snakes on wooden stakes. He spoke of the sacrifice of Jesus and the scourging and the crown of thorns and the nails in his hands and feet. You could feel the discomfit growing in the crowd, like a tremolo effect across calm water. Broussard was a master at inculcating fear, anxiety, and self-doubt in his constituency. When the tension in the crowd was such that people were clenching their arms tightly across their chests, and breathing through their mouths as though their oxygen supply were being cut off, he raised his hands high in the air and said, “But his ordeal has set us free. Our sins are paid for, just like you pay off a friend’s life insurance policy, just like you pay for his legal fees and hospital bills. Your friend can announce to the whole world, ‘I owe no debt anywhere, because it has already been paid.’ That’s what Jesus has done for you.”

The change in the audience was instantaneous, as if someone had turned on a huge electric fan and a cool breeze had begun to blow into their faces. At that point I thought he would begin curing the crippled and the terminally ill, hoaxes that are easily perpetrated in a controlled situation. But Amidee was much more sophisticated than his peers. Instead of claiming he possessed the power to heal, or that God healed through him, he told his audience the power was theirs to seize, and all they had to do was reach out and grab it.

“You heard me right,” he said into the microphone, his silver hair and high forehead gleaming under the lights, his recessed turquoise eyes radiant in his weathered face. “It doesn’t cost you money. You don’t have to pledge or tithe or sign up as a church member. You’ve already given witness by being here. The power of the Holy Spirit is within you. You take it with you wherever you go, and every day it grows stronger. You’re part of a special group now. It’s that easy. If your life doesn’t change after tonight, I want you to come back and tell me that. Know what? I’ve said that ten thousand times, and it’s never happened. And why is that? Because once you’re saved, your salvation can never be taken away from you.”

I never saw a local audience give anyone a longer and more enthusiastic ovation than Amidee Broussard received that night.

Clete went to the restroom and rejoined me in the concourse. He was wearing his shades and seersucker suit and a Panama hat and a tropical shirt with the collar outside the jacket, and he looked like a neocolonial on the streets of Saigon. “A guy in the head said there’s a big lawn party for Broussard at a place on the Vermilion River. What do you want to do?”

“Let’s go.”

“How do you read this dude?” he asked.

“I think he could probably sell central heating to the devil,” I replied.

“He doesn’t seem like a bad guy. I’ve heard worse.”

“He’s a snake-oil salesman. He’s smarter and more cunning than most, but he’s a fraud, just like Varina Leboeuf and the Duprees.”

Clete now knew about Varina’s connection to the Chris-Craft boat with the sawfish on the bow, and I saw his expression change at the mention of her name. I rested my hand on his shoulder as we walked toward the exit. “Let her go,” I said.

“I already have.”

“I don’t think that’s true. When you sleep with a woman, you always believe you’ve married her. You’re not a one-night-stand man, Cletus.”

“Why don’t you tell the whole fucking auditorium?”

“Cool it back there,” a man in front of us said.

Clete looked around uncertainly. “Oh, excuse me, you’re talking to me? The rest of us don’t have First Amendment rights because you say so? Is that what you were saying?”

The man was as big as Clete and younger, jug-eared, his face like a boiled ham, the kind of tightly wrapped man who sweats inside his clothes and never takes his coat off. “Who are you guys?” he asked.

“We’re cops. That means beat it, asshole,” Clete said.

I held Clete by his upper arm until the momentum of the crowd separated us from the man. His arm felt as hard as a pressurized fire hose and was humming with the same level of energy. “What’s the matter with you?” I said.

“Remember when we walked a beat in the First District? That was the happiest time of my life.”

“We’re in the bottom of the sixth. It’s not even the seventh-inning stretch yet,” I said.

“Right, keep telling yourself that,” he replied. “I need a drink.” He took a flask from his coat pocket and unscrewed the cap with his thumb and drank it half empty before we reached the Caddy.

THE PARTY WAS being held inside a magnificent grove of oak trees wrapped with strings of white lights, backdropped by a brightly lit mansion on the Vermilion River that was owned by an oilman from Mississippi. Though the house had a swimming pool in back and probably cost a fortune to build, the final result was a cross between an architectural nightmare and a deliberate celebration of vulgarity and bad taste. The pillars were made of concrete and swollen in the middle like Disney dwarfs; the brickwork had the shiny uniformity of laminated siding, the kind that is rolled and glued onto cinder block. The ceiling-high windows, the most outstanding feature of Louisiana houses, were bracketed with nonoperational shutters painted mint green and bolted flatly on the brick like postage stamps. The patio was a bare concrete pad that had settled and cracked through the center and was infested with fire ants. Through the windows, a visitor could look into a series of rooms carpeted in different colors and filled with furniture that could have been painted with shellac that morning.

The five acres of front lawn were filled with vehicles, row after row of them, extended-cab pickups and the biggest SUVs on the market. The guests were the glad of heart and the curious and the voyeuristic or those who had recently discovered that salvation and prosperity and the exploitation of the earth’s resources were all part of the same journey.

The serving tables groaned with bowls of white and dirty rice and étouffée and deep-fried crawfish and boiled shrimp. White-jacketed black waiters sliced pork off a hog on the spit and carved up turkeys and sirloin roasts and smoked hams swimming in pineapple rings and redeye gravy. There were beer kegs in tubs of ice and a three-table bar for those who wanted champagne or highballs. With the breeze off the river and the rustle of the moss in the trees and the smell of meat dripping into an open fire, the night could not have been more perfect. What imperfection could anyone see in the scene taking place before us? Even the Vietnamese serving girls seemed like a testimony to the richness of the New American Empire, one that indeed offered sanctuary to the huddled and downtrodden.

We found a place on a bench under a spreading oak, and Clete went straight to the drinks table and came back with a Jack on the rocks and a draft Budweiser foaming over the edges of a red plastic cup. “Guess who I just talked to in the line. The guy who was giving us trouble in the concourse. He said he didn’t know we were cops and he was sorry for getting in our face. Can you figure it?”

“Figure what?”