The man opened the door and walked out on the porch and shoved open the screen, sending it back on its spring. It swung shut behind him with a loud slap. “Is that you, Lou?” he said into the darkness.
CLETE MOVED QUICKLY, closing the space between himself and the man in the black T-shirt, the silenced .40-caliber semiauto extended in front of him. “Walk toward me, hands out by your sides. Do it now,” he said. “No, no, don’t put your hands on your head. It’s not a time to be clever.”
Clete began to back up. The man in the black T-shirt wore no hat, and the rain glistened on his face and hair. His gaze swept across the yard. “Where’s everyone?” he said.
“Guess. Walk to me, bub. Play it right and you can have another season to run.”
“I’ve heard about you.”
“Good. Now do what you’re told.”
“You were in El Sal. So was I. Except I wasn’t fighting for the Communists.”
“I was killing Communists before your mother defecated you into the world, asshole. Now move it.”
“You know the expression: A guy just has to try.”
Clete raised his left hand, patting at the air, his body hunched forward like that of a man frightened for his own life rather than someone else’s. “Don’t do it, pal. Think of all the beer you didn’t drink, the steaks you didn’t eat, the broads you didn’t call up. What you’re thinking now is the ultimate impure thought. Look at me. No, no, don’t do that. Look at me. Put your hand back in front of— Oh shit.”
The man in the black T-shirt had his hand on the grips of the .45 stuck down in the back of his belt. He was grinning, his arm twisted behind him, his body contorted when Clete pulled the trigger. He made a whooshing sound, like a man who had stepped on a sharp rock. Then he sat down heavily in the mud, one hand pressed against the wound in his stomach, his head lowered as he stared at the blood on his palm, his hair separating on his scalp in the rain.
Clete picked up the .45 and went through the back door like a wrecking ball.
I DON’T THINK I learned a great deal from life. Certainly I never figured out any of the great mysteries: why the innocent suffer, why wars and pestilence seem to be our lot, why evil men prosper and go unpunished while the poor and downtrodden are oppressed. The lessons I’ve taken with me are rather simple and possibly aren’t worthy of mention. But these are the two I remember most. When I was a young lieutenant in the United States Army and about to experience my first combat, I was very afraid and had no one to whom I could confess my fear. I was sure my ineptitude would cause not only my own death but also the deaths of the men and boys for whom supposedly I was an example. Then a line sergeant told me something I never forgot: “Don’t think about it before it starts, and don’t think about it when it’s over. If you have nightmares, there’s always an all-night bar open someplace, if you don’t mind the tab.”
The larger lesson I took from the sergeant’s statement was the implication about the arbitrary and accidental nature of both birth and death. Just as we have no control over our conception and our delivery from the birth canal, the hour of our death is not of our choosing, and neither are the circumstances surrounding it. An admission of powerlessness is not a choice. That’s just the way things are.
I can’t say these lessons ever brought me peace of mind. But they did allow me to feel that in the time I was on earth, I at least saw part of the truth that governs our lives.
When Clete came through the kitchen door, he had no idea what to expect. Kermit Abelard and Robert Weingart and Carolyn Blanchet were all standing under the kitchen light. Maybe it was the presence of a woman that caused Clete to hesitate, or the fact that Kermit did not have a weapon in his hand. Or perhaps his eyes did not adjust quickly enough to the change from darkness to light. But by the time he had swung the silenced Smith & Wesson toward Weingart, Weingart had raised his .25 semiauto and pointed it directly at Clete’s chest. Then, coward that he was, his face was averted when he pulled the trigger, lest Clete get off a shot before he went down.
The report of the .25 was like the pop of a firecracker. The bullet punched a small hole in the strap of Clete’s shoulder holster, inches above his heart. He crashed against the breakfast table, dropping the silenced semiautomatic to the floor, the .45 falling loose from his pants. I could see him fighting not to go down, struggling to get his .38 loose from its holster.
Carolyn Blanchet was screaming hysterically. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Molly cut through the tape on her ankles and tear the tape off her mouth and come toward me. I extended my wrists behind me, then felt the weight of the scissors wedge between my hands, the blades slicing into the tape. In the kitchen, Kermit was shouting at Weingart, “Shoot him! Shoot him! Shoot him!”
Clete straightened up, grasping the back of a chair with one hand, lifting his .38 in front of him. Weingart shot him again, this time high up on the right arm. Clete went down in the chair, doubling over. For a second, there was no sound in the house except the wind blowing a shower of pine needles across the roof. I took the scissors from Molly’s hand and freed my ankles. “Get Alf loose and go out the front,” I said.
“You have to come with us,” she said.
“Clete’s going to die,” I said.
“We’ll get help,” she said, her voice starting to break.
“I’ll never leave Clete,” I said. “My shotgun is in the closet. You guys go on. Please.”
“He’s right, Molly. Come on,” Alafair said, getting to her feet, the tape still hanging from her wrists and ankles.
I ran into the bedroom and pulled my cut-down twelve-gauge from the back of the closet. My hands were shaking as I got down the box of shells from the shelf and thumbed five rounds in the magazine. Then I dipped another handful of shells out of the box, stuffed them in my pocket, and went into the kitchen.
Clete still sat in the chair, his face white with the first stages of shock. The phone on the counter had been torn from the jack, the receiver broken in half. Carolyn Blanchet was huddled in a corner, trembling all over, her makeup running, her mouth contorted. Weingart and Kermit were gone, and so were my .45 and the silenced semiauto.
“Where are they?” I said.
“Bagged ass down the slope, I think. They were talking about a boat,” Clete said. “Maybe down toward The Shadows.”
His breathing was ragged, the color leaching out of his hands and arms. A single rivulet of blood was running from the hole above his heart. He looked into my face. “I know what you’re thinking, big mon,” he said. “Go after them. Don’t stay here. If they come back through the house, it’ll be to clip us both. Remember what I said. It’s a black flag. Don’t let these guys skate again.”
I turned to Carolyn Blanchet. “You get off your ass and take care of him,” I said. “You do whatever he says. If I come back and he’s not all right, you’ll leave here in a body bag.”
I went out the back door into the yard. I could see Tripod on the tree limb above his hutch, shaking with fear, his chain dripping from his neck. The rain had slackened, but the fog was thicker and whiter, the trees and camellia bushes glistening with it. Out on the bayou, I could hear a powerboat coming upstream from The Shadows. I suspected it was the one that Kermit and Weingart had planned to use for their escape. But the boat did not stop or pull into the bank. Instead, the driver gave it the gas, and a moment later it shot past the back of my property, whining into the distance.
Kermit and Weingart were on their own.
“Give it up,” I said.
The only sound in the yard was the ticking of the rain on the canopy. Weingart had manipulated the system all his life. Why should he either fear or heed it now? The same with Kermit Abelard. He had been born into wealth and privilege and had managed to convince others and probably himself as well that he was an egalitarian rebel. In reality, he had created an inextricable bond with another dysfunctional man, each finding in the other what he lacked, the two of them probably creating a third personalit
y that was subhuman and genuinely monstrous.
I didn’t care to dwell on the psychological complexities of evil men. Whether their kind possesses the wingspread of a Lucifer or a moth is a question better left to theologians. Clete needed me. If I could be certain I had established a safe perimeter, I could return to Clete and let my colleagues take care of Kermit Abelard and Robert Weingart. But that was not the way things would work out.
The fog was like steam on my skin. My eyes were stinging and I couldn’t trust my vision. Across the bayou, I thought I saw lights burning in City Park. But I realized the luminosity inside the fog came from another source. The vessel was a double-decker, its passenger windows lamplit, its beam big enough to withstand ten-foot seas. I could hear the engines throbbing through the decks and the sound of water cascading off a paddle wheel on the stern.
“Look what you have wrought, Mr. Robicheaux,” Kermit’s voice said from the darkness. “You’re a controller. You poisoned my relationship with your daughter. You tormented my grandfather. Hubris is your bane. You’re like most alcoholics. You’ve superimposed all your character defects onto others and brought down your house.”
“If I harmed you in any way, Kermit, I regret not doing a whole lot more of it,” I said.
“If you’re so brave, Mr. Robicheaux, walk out here and face me man-to-man.”
In the darkness I could see little more than the shapes of the trees and the camellia bushes and the air vines and Spanish moss that dripped with rain. I doubted that Kermit Abelard wanted to duel under the oaks. He was a creature of guile, and I suspected he was trying to distract me until Robert Weingart could position himself and get a clear shot at me.
I knelt on one knee in the leaves and pine needles, the cut-down twelve-gauge tilted at a forty-five-degree angle. I heard footsteps to my right. As a parasite and a narcissist, Weingart had made a career out of earning the trust of others, making them dependent upon him, flattering them when need be, then quickly deflating them and injecting feelings of failure and guilt in them, and finally sucking the lifeblood from their veins. As with all his ilk, he didn’t do well on a level playing field. When I heard a rotted branch break under his foot, he was still forty feet from me, not close enough for an unskilled shooter to take out a target in the dark.
The wind gusted down the slope when I saw him. He was standing between a camellia bush and the bamboo border between my property and the neighbor’s. The bamboo swayed and rattled in the wind; the leaves and flowers on the camellia bush filled with air and motion. Weingart remained frozen, the only unmoving object in his immediate environment.
I snugged the stock of the shotgun against my shoulder and aimed at the silhouette. “I win, you lose. Throw your piece down. Make sure I hear it hit the ground,” I said.
But he chose otherwise. That was when I pulled the trigger. My shells were loaded with double-aught buckshot. My guess was he took most of the pattern in the face.
I ejected the empty casing and moved farther down the slope. Weingart was on his back, still alive, strangling on his own blood. I picked up his .25 auto and dropped it in my pocket.
“Robert?” I heard Kermit call. When there was no reply, he said, “Robbie, where are you? Are you hurt?”
I remained motionless by a slash pine and waited. My palms were sweating on the twelve-gauge. I thought I heard a siren coming down Main. The moon moved out from behind a cloud; a solitary band of cold light broke through the canopy and I saw Kermit standing three feet from an enormous live oak, one in whose heart the rusted mooring chains of a slave ship were encased in the wood.
“Last chance, Kermit,” I said.
He held both hands straight out by his sides, like a man surrendering himself for crucifixion. He was holding my .45 in his right hand. “Do it. I want you to,” he said.
“That’s a job for the state of Louisiana. Bend down slowly, your left hand on your head, and place my weapon on the ground.”
“Sure,” he said. But he made no move.
“You told Alafair this is your crucifixion year. Sorry, Kermit, but you just don’t make the cut.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, really. You couldn’t even get a job as the Good Thief.”
I thought I heard the back door of the house slam behind me. But I couldn’t look away from Kermit. I saw him spread his feet in a shooter’s position and fold his hands in front of him, and I knew my .45 was aimed directly at my face.
The blast from the shotgun knocked him through a camellia bush. I think he cried out, but I can’t be sure. My ears were ringing, the air tannic with the smell of burnt gunpowder. My shoulder ached and my face was swollen out of shape from the blows I had taken in the house, the skin electric to the touch. I ejected the empty casing from the shotgun and watched it roll smoking down the embankment. Then I heard feet running behind me as Clete yelled from the back steps, “Dave, look out, she had a piece in her purse!”
I started to turn around, my left hand working the pump on the twelve-gauge, but it was too late. Carolyn Blanchet had slowed to a brisk walk, slow enough to aim with one outstretched arm, her face twisted like a harridan’s. “You thought you could talk to me like that? Who do you think you are?” she said.
And she shot me in the back.
Strangely, I felt little pain. The blow was like a smack from a fist between the shoulder blades, just enough to knock the breath out of me, to buckle my knees for a second or two, to make the trees and the bayou lose shape, to make me drop the shotgun and stumble down the slope to the place I knew I was now going.
I could see the paddle wheeler in the fog, a gangway lowered in the shallows. Behind me, Clete was lumbering off balance down the incline, calling my name. Maybe he shot Carolyn Blanchet, but I couldn’t be sure. The sounds inside my head were impossible to separate. I saw Molly and Alafair saying good-bye to me, and Tripod and Snuggs walking back up the slope to the house. I saw a black medic from my platoon pressing a cellophane cigarette wrapper on a hole in my lung, saying, Sucking chest wound, motherfucker. Breathe through your mouth. Chuck got to breathe. I heard steam engines roaring and hissing so loudly they seemed to be tearing the paddle wheeler apart. I heard the blades of the dust-off coming in over the canopy, the downdraft flattening the elephant grass, the twirling smoke of marker grenades sucking away into the sky. I felt a syrette of morphine go into my thigh and radiate through my body like an erotic kiss. I felt people gathering me up by my arms and legs and lifting me above their heads, but not onto the Huey. They were helping me to my feet, steadying me between them, leading up the gangway onto the deck of the paddle wheeler, a place I did not want to go.
I saw my father, Big Al, in his tin hard hat and my mother, Alafair Mae Guillory, in the pillbox hat she was so proud of, both of them on the bow, smiling, coming toward me. I saw men from my platoon, their rent fatigues laundered, their wounds glowing with a white radiance, and I saw boys in sun-bleached butternut and tattered gray, and I saw Golden Glove boxers from the state finals of 1956 and black musicians from Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room on Bourbon. I saw grifters and martyred Maryknollers and strippers and saints and street people of every kind, and until that moment, I never realized how loving and beautiful human beings could be.
I heard the paddle wheel churn to life on the stern, showering the air with its spray. Then I saw Clete emerge from the fog on the bank, his face white from blood loss, his clothes streaked with water and dotted with mud. He stumbled up the gangway like an irascible drunk wrecking a party, wrapping his arms around me, locking his hands behind my back, pulling me back down toward the bank. His mouth was pressed against the side of my head, and I could hear the hoarseness of his voice an inch from my ear: “You can’t go, Streak. The Bobbsey Twins from Homicide are forever.”
And that’s the way it went in the year 2009, the two of us locked together on a gangplank on the banks of Bayou Teche, in New Iberia, Louisiana, praying for the pinkness of another dawn, like finding safe harbor inside a gi
ant conch shell, the winds of youth and spring echoing eternally.
James Lee Burke, The Glass Rainbow
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