“I heard he was eccentric and moved to New Orleans. That’s it.”
“There’s something I don’t get. LaForchette said the perv molested Adonis for five years?”
“Right,” I said.
“And in all that time Adonis didn’t say anything to his father, or his father didn’t know something was going on?”
“Molestation victims blame themselves. Maybe Adonis was afraid of his father.”
“There’s another possibility,” Clete said.
“Don’t start thinking too deep on this,” I said.
“Fathers rape their daughters, and the daughters are so confused they think they enjoy it. They think it’s a natural expression of their father’s love. Then when they realize it’s not, they get fucked up in the head and feel double the guilt. It’s the ultimate mind-fuck.”
I looked at the sky. The stench of the burned garbage seemed worse. The clouds over the lake looked like they were weeping. “There’s something cursed about this place. Let’s get out of here.”
“And go where?”
“A diner. Shoot me the next time I drag you out of the sack on a Sunday.”
“You got to keep a bright outlook,” he said. “Like when my ex dumped me for that phony Buddhist priest in Colorado who made his flock take off their clothes. I told her no hard feelings and gave the two of them my favorite toothbrush. You got to stay on the sunny side, noble mon.”
We ate hamburgers at a truck stop outside LaPlace, where Kid Ory was born on Christmas Day in 1886. Why did I mention that fact? Because as Mr. Faulkner famously said, the past is always with us, and we can no more deny its presence than we can deny the dead who lie buried under our cane fields and golf courses and interstate highways, their mouths and eye sockets stopped with dirt, their identities and final words still hanging on the wind if we would only hear them.
But Kid Ory was not on my mind. Clete was doing something at our table that I didn’t understand; simultaneously, he was receding to a place inside himself that had no sunny side. He had taken from his wallet the photo of the Jewish mother and her children who were walking to a gas chamber at Auschwitz, their shoulders hunched in the cold.
I touched his forearm. “Maybe not dwell on that today, huh?”
“Why not?”
“Because you can’t change it.”
“What kind of people would put children in a gas chamber?”
I saw the waiter glance at us, then look away. I put down my hamburger and pretended I needed to use the restroom. When I returned to the counter, Clete had refolded the photo and placed it inside its pouch. But the pouch still lay on the counter next to his wallet.
“You know some of Kid Ory’s recordings are on the jukebox here?” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, looking at nothing.
“What’s wrong, Cletus?”
“Sometimes I think Nazis like Goebbels and Mengele are still out there, waiting for their time to come around again. I got this voice in my head that wakes me up in the middle of the night.”
“It’s not just a bad dream?”
“It tells me we’re supposed to stop something that’s about go down,” he said.
“I think you’re flirting with depression,” I said. “It peels off a piece of your brain and gets inside you. You got to get outside of yourself, Clete. And don’t be telling anybody about voices in your head.”
“Why?”
“It’s a symptom of schizophrenia,” I said.
“I’ve always had voices in my head,” he said.
“So have I. That’s why I don’t tell anyone. It can get you locked up.”
He pushed away his plate. “I got to get some air.”
“Finish your hamburger. We’ll listen to a couple of Kid Ory numbers.”
“I feel like the earth is dying,” he said. “What’s wrong with me, Dave?”
He told me to drop him off at the apartment and office he owned in the Quarter. I tried to argue with him, but he said he had work to do for New Orleans’s most famous bondsmen, Wee Willie Bimstine and Nig Rosewater, and he would see me in New Iberia during the week.
“What about your Caddy?” I said. It was still in New Iberia.
“I’ll get a rental.”
Clete’s Cadillac convertible and his building in the Quarter were the only two indispensable material possessions in his life; along with his porkpie hat, his personae was incomplete without them. This was the first time I was truly worried about his state of mind.
It was dusk when I drove away from his apartment. In the rearview mirror, I saw him struggling with the lock on the gate of his courtyard. I braked to the curb and started to back up. He must have seen my brake lights, because he waved me on, almost angrily, then raked the gate loose from the jamb and disappeared inside the shadows.
I drove around the block. By the time I was in front of his building again, the lights were on upstairs. Nonetheless, I pulled to the curb. He opened the French doors onto the balcony and stepped outside. The sky was a deep purple, the Spanish ironwork on his balcony draped with bougainvillea and bugle vine.
“What are you doing, Dave?” he called.
“I’m starting a second career as a voyeur,” I replied.
He shut the French doors and turned off the lights. I drove away, my heart sick.
I thought about going to a meeting of the Work the Steps or Die, Motherfucker group, but the problem on my mind was not booze or dry-drunking; it was Clete Purcel and the wheels that turned inside him.
I had never worried about Clete going up against the Mob or corrupt cops or homicidal meltdowns who sang on their way to the injection table. (Do you know John Wayne Gacy’s last words to his executioners? “Kiss my ass.”) The real enemy in Clete’s life was Clete; his self-destructive powers were far greater than the ones he unleashed on his adversaries.
Someone had figured out a way to get to him. The man in the cowl who had hung him from the wrecker had taken on mythic dimensions. Was he a religious fanatic? A common Sicilian gun-for-hire? Or a man whose progenitor had a triangular-shaped head and could have slithered from a tree in a Mesopotamian garden?
I had no answer. Not about the man in the cowl, not about Clete, not about myself. The loss of a spouse, the depression that follows, the loneliness inside one’s home are not easy to bear. Fidelity to the dead is not only onerous; at four in the morning, it can be a bed of iron spikes.
What am I saying? Every cop, either in plainclothes or in uniform, knows that eventually he will meet a vulnerable woman, perhaps a rape victim, a battered wife at a shelter, a survivor of a family catastrophe, a junkie hanging by a thread at the methadone clinic. Maybe the cop is well intentioned and tries to assure himself that he will not cross the line and violate his role as the knight errant in blue. But maybe the woman or girl is too helpless, too warm inside his arms, her face too beautiful to get out of his mind.
I started to take I-10 through Baton Rouge to New Iberia, then swung off the exit into Metairie. A rainstorm had blown in from the Gulf, covering the moon and stars and sprinkling the asphalt with hailstones. By the time I reached Leslie Rosenberg’s house, the streets and rain ditches had begun to flood. I parked and ran for her porch, rain blinding me. When she opened the door, her face looked like it was caught in a strobe, bladed and unsure, as though she were entering a crossroads that had no traffic signals.
“What’s the haps?” I said.
Leslie was wearing white shorts and sandals and an olive-green T-shirt and had been doing exercises in front of the television when I rang the bell. Shane was playing on the television. I had not realized how tan and long Leslie’s legs were. They looked like they never ended.