“That’s wonderful,” I said when he was done.
“Think so?”
“I don’t know if I’ve done you much good coming here,” I said. “But I want to leave you with a thought: Don’t be the dumb bastard I was.”
“I don’t know what you mean, Mr. Dave.”
“Don’t let anyone take your first love from you. You’ll never forgive yourself. Steal her away or give up your life if you have to.”
“Is that what happened to you?”
“Mine to know and grieve on. I got to go,” I said. I stood up and placed my hand on his shoulder. “Watch your ass, kid.”
Chapter Seventeen
One week later, Mark Shondell was back in town, perhaps with Isolde or perhaps not. People were afraid to ask. If you have not lived in a small Southern town or city, you will probably find this strange. But the greatest fear in our culture has always been deprivation. It trumps all the other sources of our discontent, including the racism that has been with us since Reconstruction. So maybe it seemed almost appropriate, considering the times in which we find ourselves, that Mark Shondell returned to New Iberia with a former Klan leader and neo-Nazi by the name of Bobby Earl.
I do not mean to impugn Bobby. He had been with us a long time. He was not the problem. We were. He was the aggregate for everything that was wrong in us. Unfortunately, he was a master at making use of his perverse gifts to mesmerize a crowd and validate their barely concealed desire to do great physical injury to Jews and people of color. Women loved him, ignoring the fact that most of his facial features were the product of plastic surgery. Men did, too. He was a womanizer, an LSU graduate, and he attended all their home games. Invariably, he was interviewed in front of Tiger Stadium before the game, exuding an almost rapturous adoration of the Southeastern Conference because it was comprised entirely of Southerners, concluding for the television audience that no matter the numbers on the scoreboard, both teams were victorious. Bobby was a pioneer in the conflation of militarism, football, and evangelical Christianity. I wonder sometimes why his constituency has not raised a statue in his honor.
His lies, his disingenuousness, the way he could create a tragic profile before a camera, like Jefferson Davis gazing upon the ruins of Richmond, were seldom if ever challenged, even by the media, because Bobby Earl was impervious to insult and, in reality, thrived upon it, floating above the fray like a phoenix above the ash.
He wore tailored three-piece gray suits like the one worn by Robert Lee during the surrender at Appomattox, although I doubted that Bobby had any grasp on the meaning of Lee’s last words when the old general suddenly woke on his deathbed and cried out, “Strike the tent and tell Hill he must come up.” I also doubted that Bobby Earl would enjoy marching up the slope at Cemetery Ridge with the boys in butternut, many of them barefoot and emaciated, tearing down fences in ninety-degree heat as they went, while Yankee grapeshot and canister and chain whistled in their midst and air bursts blew off the tops of their best friends’ skulls.
Clete had been in New Orleans for five days. When he returned to New Iberia, I asked him to go to lunch with me at Bon Creole out on Old Spanish Trail. We ordered po’boy sandwiches and shrimp and sausage gumbo and iced tea, and while we waited for our order, I told him everything Johnny had said about the man named Gideon Richetti.
“Johnny says that’s the guy who hung me upside down?” Clete said.
“Yeah, but I came up with blanks,” I said. “There doesn’t seem to be any such guy anywhere. No sheet, no prints, nothing.”
“He travels through time? What the fuck is that?”
“Will you lower your voice?”
“You went through NCIC?” he said.
“Everywhere. The FBI, the state police, the state attorney’s office in Florida, John Walsh.”
“Why him?”
“He finds people nobody else can.”
I could see Clete’s frustration. I was giving him information that was not information while calling to mind one of the worst experiences of his life.
His gaze wandered around the room. There were antlers and deer heads and a marlin mounted on the walls. Then he looked out the window at a black Mercury with tinted windows that had just parked under a live oak. The waiter put our food on the table. Clete went to the window and came back. “If that guy comes in here, I’m calling the health department.”
“What guy?”
“Bobby Earl.”
“Clete, if you get us kicked out of here—”
“Don’t start,” he replied, popping open a napkin on his lap.
“I mean it.”
“The passenger window is down,” he said. “The Balangie girl is in the front seat. They don’t have the decency to bring her inside.”
Bobby Earl and Mark Shondell came through the front door and got in the service line. All faces in the restaurant turned toward them. But in one second, with no change of expression, the same people looked quickly at their food or at their hands or at the deer heads and the marlin on the wall. Mark Shondell looked across the room at us and smiled, but I didn’t acknowledge him. He left the line and came to our table. His tan was darker than the last time I had seen him, his expensive clothes immaculate, not one hair out of place on his head. The jeweled rings on his fingers glinted under the ceiling lights. “It’s nice to see you, Dave,” he said, ignoring Clete.
I didn’t answer.
“Sir, did you hear me?” he said.
“Yeah, I did,” I replied, looking through the window at the Mercury.
“Then what seems to be your problem?”
“Your treatment of Isolde Balangie,” I said.
He looked over his shoulder, then back at me. “Her stomach is upset. She didn’t want to come inside.”
“You’re molesting her, you son of a bitch.”
The waiter and waitress and patrons became motionless, as though they were painted on the air. You could not hear a fork or spoon scrape against a plate or saucer.
“How dare you,” he said.
“Get away from our table,” I said.
I doubted that Mark Shondell had ever been called to task in public. A single blue vein was throbbing in his left temple. “You will not speak to me like this.”
“Don’t embarrass yourself any worse than you have,” I said.
“Walk outside with me,” he said.
“No, we’ll end this right here,” I said. I stood up, and with my open hand, I slapped him across the face as hard as I could, so hard his chin hit his shoulder.
“Oh, shit, Dave,” I heard Clete whisper.
I cannot tell you with exactitude what happened next. I felt as though I were standing in the middle of a dream from which I couldn’t wake. The other patrons were staring at their uneaten food. Bobby Earl slipped his arm inside Shondell’s. “Let’s go, Mark,” he said. “It’s all right. He’ll never be your equal.”
He led Shondell outside in the silence.
“How about those Saints?” Clete said to everyone in the room.
No one laughed.
It wasn’t over. I followed Bobby and Shondell into the parking lot. The sky was blue, the live oak above us full of wind. It was a grand day and should have been one of celebration, but I knew a couple of cruisers were probably on their way and that I didn’t have long before someone else took over the situation. Shondell was already in the backseat, and Bobby Earl was getting behind the wheel. I opened the passenger door. Isolde Balangie looked up at me. Her cheeks were pooled with color, her whitish-blond hair sifting on her face. She made me think of an abandoned doll.