“Where do you think you’re going?” she said at my back.
“The medics drove away with Julian while we were jacking off. I’ll be at Iberia General. I’ll bum a ride.”
She grabbed me by the arm and spun me around. “Outside of Clete Purcel, I’m the best friend you ever had, Dave. Don’t talk like that to me again.”
“Wake up, Helen. We’re dealing with the supernatural. We just can’t tell anybody. Sometimes the truth isn’t an easy burden to bear.”
She told me to take the cruiser while she waited for the coroner. On the way to the hospital, I called Clete and told him Julian was being admitted and asked him to meet me there. “I think Delmer Pickins tortured him.” I said. “There’re body parts scattered all over the road in front of Julian’s house. I suspect they belong to Pickins.”
“I had a few drinks before I went to bed,” Clete said. “I’m having a little trouble following this.”
“It’s Gideon.”
“I knew that was coming.”
“In or out?” I said.
“Let me brush my teeth. We ROA at the ER.”
He was there in fifteen minutes. His face looked poached. I could still smell liquor on him. I put a roll of mints in his hand.
“My liver feels like an anvil,” he said. “Where’s Father Julian?”
“Behind the curtain,” I said.
Clete had seen the worst of the worst in free-fire zones. But this was different. The wounds were inflicted systemically, engineered to draw the maximum in pain and humiliation. Clete’s face was bloodless and as tight as a drumhead, his green eyes shiny. “Hey, Father,” he said, his voice hoarse. “I thought I’d better come down here and make sure you didn’t run off with one of the nurses. Like the Blue Nun running off with the Christian Brothers or something. That was in a poem I read by a Catholic nun.”
“Call me Julian.”
“We’re going to get you well,” Clete said. “Dave and me and the docs and the nurses. We’ll be going out on the salt and catching us some white trout.”
“I have to say something,” Julian said. His voice was weak, the corner of his mouth puffed, three inches of stitches in one cheek, one eye swollen shut, both hands wrapped with bandages.
“Go ahead,” Clete said.
“I watched my tormentor die. I took pleasure in his suffering.”
“You got it all wrong,” Clete said. “What you were watching was justice being done. You paid the cost for getting this guy off the planet. The pain you suffered made sure this cocksucker will never hurt anyone again. End of story.”
I had to hand it to Cletus. I had never thought of it that way, and I suspect Julian hadn’t, either.
“It was Gideon who ripped Pickins apart?” Clete said.
“Who?” Julian said.
“Delmer Pickins. The guy who tortured you. Gideon tore him up?”
“Yes,” Julian said.
“Who would send a guy like that after you?” Clete said.
Julian fixed his unclosed eye on the ceiling. “I don’t know.”
“You’re not being on the square, Father,” Clete said. “Mark Shondell put a hit on both of us and, I suspect, on Dave, too. He’s going to send somebody else after us.”
“Don’t do what you’re thinking,” Julian said, his voice barely audible.
“I don’t know what I’m thinking,” Clete said. “See, my own thoughts scare me, so I don’t allow myself to think. That’s how I keep control of myself.”
Under other circumstances, we would have laughed. But there was a great evil in our midst, and it was of our own creation and had nothing to do with a time traveler from the year 1600. The evil I’m talking about was incarnate in a Sorbonne-educated man whose family had lived among us for generations. He had vowed to destroy Hollywood and the Jews in it and was probably a molester and had ordered the murder of his enemies. We feared his power and his name, and lied to ourselves and doffed our hats and pretended we were simply adhering to a genteel culture passed on to us from an earlier time. In the meantime Mark Shondell was kindling the fires of racism and the resurgence of nativism and division, all of it inside his headquarters on the banks of Bayou Teche, the place I loved more than any other on earth.
Clete and I left the hospital together. The rain had stopped, and the constellations were cold and bright, and great plumes of white smoke were rising from the lighted stacks of the sugar mill. Clete had not spoken since we had left the ER. An unlit cigarette hung from his mouth. He opened the door of his Caddy; the interior light reflected on his face. His eyes were pools of darkness. I pulled the cigarette from his mouth and tossed it over my shoulder.
“Don’t try to stop me, Streak.”
I shoved him in the chest.
“What the hell are you doing?” he said.
I shoved him again. Hard.
“Cut it out, big mon.”
“You’re not going to do this, Clete.”
“I’ve done worse and you didn’t say anything about it. Now get away from me.”
“You’ll end up in Angola and give the high ground to Shondell.”
“The only ground he’s going to get is a shovel full of dirt in the face.”
“I’ll hook you up and put you in a cage if I have to,” I said.
He got in his pink Caddy and slammed the door, then started the engine and rolled down the window. “Mark Shondell turns people against each other. You’re falling into his trap, Streak. Now step back.”
He put his vehicle in reverse and almost drove over my foot, then floored the accelerator and bent down on the wheel like an albino ape. As I watched him drive away in the darkness, the blue-dot brake lights coming on at the drawbridge, I felt I was witnessing the end of an era or perhaps the end of innocence in our lives. For the first time, I truly understood why the music of Johnny Shondell and Isolde Balangie laid such a large claim on our souls.
On Sunday Helen told reporters from The Daily Iberian, The Daily Advertiser, and The Associated Press that the death of Delmer Pickins was being investigated as a hit-and-run homicide and that Pickins, a former inmate of Huntsville Penitentiary, was in all probability fleeing the scene of an assault on a local priest when he was struck by a vehicle traveling at high speed. The violence of the impact indicated the vehicle was a large one, perhaps a truck.
Two days later, Mark Shondell and a houseguest, a Central American army general who may have been involved in the murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero, were having breakfast by the pool when a sniper locked down on them from across the bayou and let off three rounds. The first splattered a decanter of tomato juice on the white tablecloth; the second clipped off the general’s right index finger; and the third popped through Shondell’s blue silk kimono as he was racing for the safety of the house, with no injury to Shondell.
As soon as we got the 911, I called Clete’s cell phone, which went immediately to voicemail. I also called his office in New Iberia and his office in the French Quarter. Both receptionists told me he was out of town, perhaps fishing in the Florida Keys. Or Biloxi. Or Kemah over in Texas. “You know how Mr. Clete is,” the receptionist in New Iberia said.
“No, I don’t know how Mr. Clete is,” I said. “Can you tell me?”
“He goes here, he goes there. You never know where he’s at. Want to leave a message?”
There is nothing like life in southern Louisiana.
At noon I called Penelope Balangie at her home on Lake Pontchartrain. That probably does not seem a wise thing to have done. But I had no doubt about the identity of the shooter on the bayou. Clete was a dead shot. That the shooter had fired three times without mortally wounding his target suggested either an amateur or a pro. I believed it was the latter. My only doubt had to do with Clete’s intention.