“Say it anyway.”
“I see the way you look at Bailey Ribbons. I don’t blame you. For me, she’s Clementine Carter. She takes us into the past, into our first love, into America before the railroad guys and the industrialists got their hands on it. When you’re with her, every day is spring, and death holds no dominion in your life.”
How do you get mad at a man who speaks in Petrarchan sonnets? “I talked with Bella Delahoussaye this afternoon.”
“Who?”
“She’s Butterworth’s alibi. He told the truth about lending her his Subaru. There’s a problem, though.”
“What?”
“She said he also drives a dark-colored SUV. An SUV fled the Devereaux murder scene.”
“I already explained that,” Desmond said. “We have several in the car pool. For God’s sake, get away from this obsession with Hollywood. You’re all alike. You can’t stand success. You can’t stand art or reason or anything that isn’t like your putrid way of life. All of you are searching for a house with no mirrors.”
“Good try,” I said.
He looked at the sweep of leaves on the street, the electric lamps burning inside the oak boughs, the dreamlike shade that was stealing across the lawns of homes that Jefferson Davis’s widow once visited. “I apologize. This is my birthplace, too. You have more claim on it, though. I’ve done wrong by all of you. I wish I could change that. But I probably never will.”
There was nothing grandiose or thespian or saccharine in his voice or expression. He walked to his car, his physicality barely restrained by his thin slacks and wash-faded shirt.
I was convinced that, like Helen Soileau, many people lived inside Desmond’s skin, male and female, child and adult. He had never married, nor was he ever long in the company of one woman. For certain he was an egalitarian, an aesthete, an actor, and a painter. He had the flame of a mad artist, the voice of a singer, and the indifference to criticism that all great artists possess without being aware of it. I said earlier that he could light a room with his smile. It had been a long time since I had seen him do that. Were Clementine Carter and Bailey Ribbons his keys to resurrection, the rolling away of a rock that blocked out the sun and stole the air from his lungs?
The next morning Antoine Butterworth bailed out of jail. There was no DNA of any kind on the hypodermic needle. His lawyer had our trumped-up charges dropped.
Six weeks passed without significant incident, and we found ourselves in the softly murmuring heart of Indian summer and the drowsy days and cool nights that grant us a stay against winter and the failing of the light. I began to think that our investigation into the bizarre homicides of Lucinda Arceneaux and Joe Molinari and Travis Lebeau and Axel Devereaux was overwrought and heavily influenced by speculation. I also wondered if Bailey and I had unknowingly superimposed symbols on each case in order to link them together. It happens. The best example is the murder of President Kennedy and the conspiratorial theories that are still with us. As the mind wearies, the temptation is to simplify and move on. The collective consciousness does not like detail and complexity. Besides, isn’t it better to let evil die inside its own flame?
I wanted to slip away with the season and the smell of burning leaves and the vestiges of an innocent youth. In a moment of reverie, I would recall a college dance at Southwestern Louisiana Institute, the music provided by Jimmy Dorsey and his orchestra, a fall crawfish boil under the oaks in the park next to the campus, the thrill of the kickoff at an LSU — Ole Miss football game, where every coed wore a corsage and ached to be kissed.
I was not simply tired of the world’s iniquity. I was tired of greed in particular and the ostentatious display of wealth that characterizes our times, and the justifications for despoiling the earth and injuring our fellow man. The great gift of age is the realization that each morning is a blessing, as votive in nature as a communion wafer raised to the sky. I made a habit of letting the world go on a daily basis, but unfortunately, it didn’t want to let go of me. The engines of commerce and acquisition operate seven days a week, around the clock, granting no mercy and allowing no tender moment for those who grind away their lives in sweaty service to them.
I’m talking about the avarice at the heart of most human suffering. Yes, revenge is a player, and so are all the sexual manifestations that warp our vision, but none holds a candle to cupidity and the defenses we manufacture to protect it.
Clete would not have used the same words, although he knew them and their meaning. But his thoughts were the same when he decided to drop by the blues club on the bayou and eat barbecued chicken and dirty rice and drink a frozen mug of beer like he had in his youth at Tracey’s Bar on Third and Magazine in the Irish Channel.
Because it was Friday night, the bar and tables and the small dance floor were bursting at the gunwales. Bella Delahoussaye was singing “Got My Mojo Working” while a black man backed her up with a harmonica that moaned and whined like a train inside a church house. A bald man on the stool next to Clete leaned in to his face, yelling to be heard. His lips were sprinkled with spittle, his tie pulled loose, his stomach hanging out of his suit coat. Clete wiped his own cheek with a paper napkin and tried to lean in the opposite direction.
“Did you hear me?” the man shouted. “What do you think about the monuments thing?”
“What monuments?”
“They’re taking down the Confederate monuments in New Orleans. They just took down Robert E. Lee’s statue. What’s your opinion?”
A piece of spittle hit Clete on the chin. “I think they’re idiots. They want to turn New Orleans into Omaha. They’re doing the same thing that the Taliban and ISIS do.”
“Yes, but don’t you think it’s time to—”
“Quit yelling in my face.”
“You don’t have to get in a huff,” the man said, and swung his paunch off the stool.
Clete tried to get back to his food but looked at it and thought about what had probably just happened to it and pushed it away and reordered.
“It’s on the house, man,” the bartender said.
“Thanks,” Clete said. He put a ten on the bar. “Give the fat guy whatever he’s having. Just don’t tell him where it’s from. Keep the change.”
Bella went into “The House of the Rising Sun,” the song Eric Burdon and the Animals had turned into arguably the most haunting blues depiction of bordello life and spiritual despair ever sung. Though its message of utter hopelessness was like a dull nail driven into Clete’s heart, he had never known why. Sometimes he ascribed the feeling to the drowning of the city during Katrina, or the crack cocaine that had turned the city into the murder capital of America, or the T-shirt shops and the affectation of debauchery that impersonated the city’s earlier tradition of eccentricity and bohemian culture and Dixieland blowdowns.
The song’s influence on him had nothing to do with any of these things, or even with New Orleans. The song was about exploitation and the anonymous fate that seemed the destiny of all those who are used for the convenience of others. The song had no author. The person narrating the tale could have been male or female but had no name. The rising sun did not dispel the night, serving only to illuminate the harshness of the morning, the broken glass in the gutters, a passed-out drunk in an alley.
Clete looked up and down the bar and at the tables and at the dancers on the floor and wondered how many of them would leave the earth as ciphers, would even have a marker on a grave ten years after they were gone. His first night back in New Orleans from Vietnam, he got loaded in the Quarter and met a famous Beat writer who was feeding the pigeons on a bench in Jackson Square. The writer challenged him to name five slaves from the tens of millions who had lived and died in bondage.