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The subculture of law enforcement and parole and probation and bail bondsmen and shyster lawyers and private investigators is a sewer, one where the pervs outnumber the normals. Actually, I don’t know if the normals exist. I live with a slapjack, a .38 Special snub, and a badge holder on my kitchen counter. What that signifies is I blew my career as a real cop and became a lush and developed ulcers and a liver that probably looks like an eggplant.
Like Waylon Jennings said, “I’ve always been crazy, but it’s kept me from going insane.”
As Dave says, the South has changed greatly, and the state that has changed the most is Mississippi. But the Pearl and Tallahatchie Rivers and the rural areas along their banks will be remembered for what is worst in human beings.
You do not get into a theological discussion in the South with people like Hap Armstrong unless you enjoy talking to people who have the reasoning powers of the Ayatollah Khomeini.
You know why an education, formal or self-acquired, is worth more than Fort Knox? Other people can’t wind up your clock. Not unless you let them.
But I got a caveat here. You know what always scared me about Dave? Every day, without warning or without reason, I thought he was capable of going to a place inside his head he would never return from. That was Dave Robicheaux, a guy with a smile and a kind word, protecting people who had no power, but one who had triggers nobody saw coming. But what really bothered me was the world he lived in. He saw three crosses on a hill and the mass murder of Carthage and legionnaires plowing the earth and Atlanta and Hiroshima burning. Dave blew the minds of the psychiatrists at the VA. People think
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“Colored woman drove me.” Right there, in one short statement, was the great irony of the American South. The individuals the poor whites trust with their children, whose churches they share, whose dialect they speak, who work side by side with them in the same fields and for the same meager wages are the same people they fear and denounce as a group.
“Hey, Chen, I’m gonna fix us a couple of root beer floats.”
believed the acid had taken on a second life. But acid or not, I wanted to talk to Joan. I wanted to free her from her bonds and ride by her side; I wanted to be as brave as she was, a nineteen-year-old girl who struck fear in the most powerful men in Europe. I put on my robe and my rabbit-ear slippers and stumbled out the door and down the porch steps into the warm night air and the croaking of thousands of tree frogs.
Dave hadn’t quite accepted my relationship with Joan of Arc. Know why? He believes I think I don’t deserve a good woman so I make them up. Dave has got it all wrong. It’s him who has the problem. You should have seen his first wife, the one from Martinique. She was the kind who makes guys put their brains on the ceiling. She could have been the Antichrist. I could go on.
“I was wondering if I could borrow some wheels.” “Can you live with a hippy camper, ’cause that’s all I got right now?” he said. “I’ve always wanted to drive one of those,” I said. In minutes I was on my way over the huge arching bridge above the Atchafalaya, the engine straining, the butterfly-stamped cheesecloth curtains whipping in the wind, a Peter, Paul and Mary tape blaring, and me wondering what the life of a flower child might be like.
You don’t learn anything from people whose central purpose now and forever is to obey other people. You learn from the crazoids. It’s the same way with history, right? It’s the little people who come out of nowhere and usually disappear again, after maybe inventing the wheel.
