Clotile Arceneaux, Father Jimmie, and I walked out the front door of the courthouse together. The rain had stopped and the town looked washed and clean, the trees green against the grayness of the day, the ebb and flow of the traffic on a wet street somehow an indicator of the world's normalcy.
"What happened in there?" Father Jimmie said.
"I wouldn't worry about it," I said.
"Max Coll is behind this, isn't he?" he said.
"Who cares? Those guys deserve anything that happens to them," I said.
"I thought New Orleans was tough. Y'all have death squads over here?" Clotile said.
I started to make a flippant reply, but saw the troubled expression on Father Jimmie's face. "I have to get my car from the pound," he said.
"We'll see you at the house. Let it slide, Jimmie," I said.
"One of those men may be dead," he replied.
He walked down the street, his black suit rumpled and stained from sleeping overnight on a cement jailhouse floor.
"Your friend isn't easily consoled, is he?" Clotile said.
"Ever hear about the Jewish legend of the thirteen just men who suffer for the rest of us?"
"No. What's the point?"
"Some people have to do life in the Garden of Gethsemane," I said.
She picked up my left hand and looked at it, her fingers cool on my skin. "This is where those grease balls put the pliers to you?" she said.
"Yes."
She patted the top of my hand and released it. "Take care of your own ass for a change," she said.
CHAPTER 20
Father Jimmie had not been back at my house ten minutes when the phone rang in the kitchen. He picked it up but did not speak, his breath audible in the silence.
"Ah, you're a clairvoyant as well as a spiritual man," the voice on the other end said.
"Leave me alone. Please," Father Jimmie said.
"I got you, didn't I?"
"What do you mean?"
"Oh, you know what I mean, sir. It took a bastard like me with blood on his hands to get you out of the slams. Now it's you who owe me."
"What did you do with those men?"
"They're both alive and probably enjoying a cool drink in a warm climate by now. I think one of them mentioned Ecuador. Have to say, though, I was tempted to release them from their earthly bonds."
Father Jimmie sat down in a chair and tried to think. "Perhaps you mean well, but you cannot use violence to solve either your problems or mine," he said.
"What do you know of violence, sir? What do you fucking know of it?"
"You're full of hatred, Max. Get it out of your life. You injure yourself with it more than others."
"If I came into your confessional, would you give me absolution?"
"Yes."
"There are a couple more house calls I'd like to make."
"You don't negotiate the terms of forgiveness… Max? Did you hear me?"
But Max Coll had hung up. Father Jimmie leaned his head down on his hand, the stink of the jail still on his clothes, Snuggs the cat pacing back and forth on the table his tail dragging across Father Jimmie's face. He felt more tired than he had ever been in his life, vain and used up, now sullied by the accusation of molester, even though it was a lie.
He knew the rumor would always follow him, regardless of where he went or what he did. A wave of revulsion and anger washed through him and made him clench his fists. Is this what all the years in the seminary, the struggles with celibacy and bigots and dictatorial and obtuse superiors had been about? To end up with his name and life's work soiled by an accusation that made his skin crawl?
Why didn't he quit running a game on himself? He posed as the altruist, but other people constantly had to get him out of trouble. If he had wanted to be a true missionary and take real risks, why hadn't he joined the Maryknolls? He disdained the role of the traditional priest, but in his self-imposed piety he had become little more than a noisy gadfly dedicated to causes Carrie Nation might have supported.
He had just lectured a tormented man on his violence, although he, Jimmie Dolan, had just profited from it, and if truth be known he was glad he was on the street and perhaps secretly glad his false accusers had gotten their just deserts.
Better to marry than to burn, St. Paul had said. Better to be a bourbon priest or a diocesan sycophant than a self-canonized fool, Father Jimmie thought.
"What do you think, Snuggs?" he said.
Snuggs answered by nudging his head into Father Jimmie's chin.
Father Jimmie went into the bedroom, flung his clothes in the corner, and got under the shower. The water coughed in the pipes, then seemed to whisper the word hypocrite in his ear.
The South has changed dramatically since the civil rights legislation of the 1960s. Anyone who says otherwise has either not been there or wishes to keep old wounds green and tender as part of a personal agenda. And nowhere has the change been more visible than in the once recalcitrant states of the Deep South.
But that evening, when I took Clotile Arceneaux to supper on East Main, I tried to convince myself otherwise. I told myself the furtive glances at our table, the awkwardness of friends who felt they should stop by and say hello, were expressions of narrowness and latent racism to be expected in our culture.
The truth was no one took exception to Clotile's race. But they did take exception to my being out with another woman in less than a year of Bootsie's death.
It had turned cold again when we left the restaurant. Stars were spread across the sky, the horizon flaring with stubble fires, smoke boiling out of the electric lights at the sugar mills.
"You a little uncomfortable in there about something?" Clotile asked.
"Not me," I replied.
She opened the door to my pickup by herself and got in and closed it behind her, although I had tried to help her in. "You're really out of the past, aren't you?" she said.
"Probably," I said.
She smiled and didn't say anything. We drove toward the drawbridge and the theater complex on the other side of Bayou Teche. She had checked in to a motel out by the four-lane that afternoon.
We crossed the bayou and turned in to the theater parking lot. It was filled with teenagers, long lines of them extending out from the ticket windows.
"Friday night is a bad night for the movies here," I said.
"We don't need to go," she said, looking straight ahead.
I turned around in the parking lot, recrossed the bayou, and drove up East Main, without destination. The street seemed strangely empty, the stars shut out by the canopy of oaks overhead, my rented shotgun house dark and blown with un raked leaves. I hesitated, then pulled into my driveway and cut the engine. The ground fog in the trees and bamboo glistened in the lights from City Park across the bayou.
"Where's Father Dolan?" she asked.
"Staying with friends in Lafayette."
"You have a lot of regrets in your life, Robicheaux?" she said.
"All drunks do," I replied.
"How do you deal with them?"
"I don't labor over them anymore."
She still looked straight ahead. "I don't want to be a regret in somebody's life," she said.
"Want to meet my cat?" I said.
And that's what we did. I introduced her to Snuggs; then we ate ice cream in the kitchen and I drove her to her motel.
Afterward I went to the cemetery in St. Martinville and sat on the steel bench by Bootsie's tomb and watched the moon rise over the old French church on the bayou.
That night I dreamed I was in New Orleans in an earlier era, riding on a streetcar out to Elysian Fields. The streets were dark, the palm fronds on the neutral ground yellow with blight. No one else was on the car except the motorman. When he turned and looked back at me his eyes were empty sockets, the skin on his face dried and shrunken into little more than gauze on his skull.