Robicheaux (Dave Robicheaux #21)

by James Lee Burke

Long ago, I ceased trying to explain events such as these to either myself or others. Like many my age, I believe people in groups are to be feared and that arguing with others is folly and the knowledge of one generation cannot be passed down to the next. Those may seem cynical sentiments, but there are certain truths you keep inside you and do not defend lest you cheapen and then lose them altogether. Those truths have less to do with the dead than the awareness that we are no different from them, that they are still with us and we are still with them, and there is no afterlife but only one life, a continuum in which all time occurs at once, like a dream inside the mind of God.

Yes, Louisiana has produced some statesmen and stateswomen, but they are the exception and not the norm. For many years our state legislature has been known as a mental asylum run by ExxonMobil. Since Huey Long, demagoguery has been a given; misogyny and racism and homophobia have become religious virtues, and self-congratulatory ignorance has become a source of pride.

Jimmy pulled the cork from a green half-empty bottle of wine. “Here’s to neocolonialism everywhere.” I wasn’t up to his cynicism. I looked at the oaks, the moss lifting in the wind, purple dust rising from a cane field, Bayou Teche glinting in the sun like a Byzantine shield. La Louisiane, the love of my life, the home of Jolie Blon and Evangeline and the Great Whore of Babylon, the place for which I would die, the place for which there was no answer or cure. I said nothing more and walked to my vehicle, rude or not.

The strange phenomenon about alcoholic abstinence is that while you’re laying off the hooch and working the program, your disease is doing push-ups and waiting for the day you slip. You can ease back into the dirty boogie or hit the floor running, but I promise you, the electric tiger, or your version of it, will come back with a roar.

On CNN he said Hollywood is a potential gold mine for anthropologists because it’s the only culture in the world where educated and rich and powerful people have the mind-set and manners of Southern white trash.”

CLETE COULDN’T SLEEP that night. Forty years ago he had accepted insomnia as a way of life. For a long time the ghost of a mamasan lived on his fire escape. Sometimes he made a pot of tea for her, then put it and a demitasse and saucer and napkin and tiny spoon on the windowsill, regardless of the terror in his wife’s face. One day the mamasan moved on, and his wife joined a Buddhist cult in Boulder, one in which the members were made to remove their clothes and humiliate themselves, and Clete was left with a sense of desertion and emptiness no amount of booze or redwings or weed could kill.

Jimmy was a master. He seemed to float like a dove on a rosy glow of love and warmth that radiated from the people below. He belonged to them, and they belonged to him, like Plotinian emanations of each other. He gave voice to those who had none, and to those who had lost their jobs because of bankers and Wall Street stockbrokers and the NAFTA politicians who had made a sieve of our borders and allowed millions of illegals into our towns and cities. He never mentioned his political opponents; he didn’t have to. One boyish grin from Jimmy Nightingale could have people laughing at his challengers without knowing why, as though they and Jimmy were one mind and one heart. Was he race-baiting or appealing to the xenophobia and nativism that goes back to the Irish immigration of the 1840s? Not in the mind of his audience. Jimmy was telling it like it is.

HMMMMMM wonder who this is alluding to

THAT WAS NOT all Levon did. After confessing to an ADA in the Jeff Davis courthouse, he went out the side door, drove to a low-bottom joint north of Four Corners in Lafayette, got plowed out of his head, and at sunset drove across his lawn to the gallery on the front of his house and announced to his wife, “Hi, honey, I’m home.” Helen called me on my cell. “Get over to Levon Broussard’s place. It looks like he’s lost it.” “What’s he doing?” “Who knows? His wife called in the 911. He’s in the yard with a Confederate flag and a sword, ranting at the sky. He fired a flare pistol across the bayou and asked some people in a boat to come in for a drink. I think they’re still emptying out their shoes.”

Once again he had thoughts of a kind he’d never had, a sense of foreboding that normally only deranged or messianic people were haunted by, as though only they saw the dark portent of the events taking place around them. In Clete’s mind, Jimmy Nightingale had become the hooded figure that lives in our sleep, a memory passed on from the caves of ancient Albion and the pantheons of Philistines, the embodiment of guile and deception, a serpent cracking through its shell in a garden between the Tigris and the Euphrates.

Perhaps I’ve become a cynic. Or better said, I’ve learned to let the season have its way, to not fight against the pull of the earth and the tidal movements of the oceans and the admonitions that the race is not to the swift and that the earth abides forever.