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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.
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.
Most investigative cops, often without knowing who Niccolò Machiavelli was, adhere to his admonition to keep your friends close but your enemies closer.
The Quarter was alive with music and full of beautiful women and the smell of burgundy and tap beer and bruised mint in a glass of shaved ice and Jack Daniel’s. Could the world offer any finer gifts?
F. Scott Fitzgerald once said no one could understand America without understanding the graves of Shiloh.
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.
My wife was gone, and so were my pets and most of my relatives. With each day that passed, I felt as though the world I had known was being airbrushed out of a painting.
“You know what they say at meetings. Coincidence is your Higher Power acting with anonymity.”
Tripod had died years ago, but I often dreamed of him in my sleep, as I did my other pets, and I wondered if animals, like people I’ve known, have ways of contacting us again.
My feelings about Helen were the same as my feelings about Clete: I believed their virtues were poured from a crucible whose heat couldn’t be measured.
“You want to believe people are better than they are,” she said.
“Everyone knows Levon hates Hollywood. He thinks they screwed up a couple of his adaptations. 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.”
But I suspected Levon and Rowena already considered me unfocused and preoccupied, since, like most civilians, they had no idea how many open cases a detective has on his desk at any given moment.
He also subscribed to Orwell’s belief that people are always better than we think they are. But sometimes his idealism and innocence led him into arrogance and elitism.
“A Union flotilla came down the Teche in 1863. Twenty thousand Yankee soldiers marched right past the site of this hospital. They raped slave women and set fire to plantation homes up and down the bayou. Thomas Jefferson said, ‘I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.’ ”
“I think Jefferson was saying that justice eventually comes about but often in an imperfect way. I’m saying I don’t know if you’ll get the justice you deserve.”
PEOPLE ARE WHAT they do, not what they think, not what they say.
THEOLOGIANS CALL IT the calculated testing of others’ charity. By some it’s considered a serious sin. But for someone who is manipulative or morally insane, it’s not a big obstacle.
So being the infantile narcissist he is, he’s throwing his scat all over the room.”
I LOVE THE rain, whether it’s a tropical one or one that falls on you in the dead of winter. For me, rain is the natural world’s absolution,
Emmeline seemed to lie the way all narcissists do. Whatever they say, regardless of its absurdity, becomes the truth.
Why are you two always at the center of other people’s misfortune when you never seem to pay dues yourself?”
IN MY OPINION, one of the great follies in the world is to put yourself inside the head of dysfunctional people.
The mistake we usually make is to assume there is a rationale for their behavior.
Nobody likes cop killers, even when they kill a guy like McVane. Most of them go out smoking. Usually, they’re almost hysterical with fear and get as stoned and drunk as they can before they check out. Sometimes they take their families with them. A cop killer on the loose is like a tiger prowling a school yard. You’re going to hear a lot from him until someone pulls his plug.
“Long ago I learned that hostility and fear are first cousins,” I said.
Individuals don’t change history. History finds the individual. John Steinbeck said that.”
CLETE PURCEL WAS the most thorough and insightful and successful investigative lawman I ever knew. If he hadn’t wiped out his career with hooch and pills and weed and strippers and other women who glowed with neurosis, he could have had a job
in the Department of Justice.
Clete could have overcome his reputation for vigilantism and chaotic behavior, but his brief association with the Mob and his accidental shooting of a federal witness followed him wherever he went, in part because he was a better man and a better and more honorable cop
than his detractors could ever be. But that was poor consolation. Among those who should have been his colleagues and friends, he was a pariah and a turncoat.
“Right is right, wrong is wrong. I’m not big on rule books.”
“You and Dave Robicheaux have a way of getting into it with rich guys. It doesn’t do a lot for your credibility.” “I’ll try to explain that. Most rich people here made their money off somebody else’s back.”
“The feds used him for a long time. They must have believed him.” “Yeah, they did the same with Whitey Bulger.
“I’m a PI. When I had a real badge, I never jammed anybody. I didn’t do it then, I don’t do it now.”
OUR LITTLE TOWN was not emotionally equipped to deal with the presence of a contract killer. Oh, yes, we’re a libertine and atavistic people with a patina of Christianity, but by and large, our self-indulgence is that of children and perhaps even an expansion of Christ’s recommendation to abide Caesar.
The band played “La Jolie Blon” a second time. For me, there is no more haunting ballad in the world. Its origins go back to the eighteenth century, but the rendition by Harry Choates is the one that never leaves you.
Most people believe that law enforcement and the solving of crimes and the apprehension and prosecution of criminals proceed in a systematic, linear fashion. The opposite is true. A successful outcome is usually produced by informants and dumb luck. The waiting, the missed opportunities, the bureaucracy, the tainted or lost evidence, the witnesses who change their accounts are endless. Lassitude, frustration, and anger become a way of life.
But he was a far more complicated man, in essence a Greek tragedy, a Promethean figure no one recognized as such, a member of the just men in Jewish legend who suffered for the rest of us.
EVER HAVE CONFLICT with the concept of mercy? I’m talking about those challenges to our Judeo-Christian ethos that require us to forgive or at least not to judge and to surrender the situation to a Higher Authority.
The real issue lies in the possibility that the person to whom you’re extending mercy will repay your trust by cutting you from your liver to your lights.
The American South has a long history of demagoguery.
Budd Schulberg coined the term “demagogue in denim” for his character Lonesome Rhodes, portrayed by Andy Griffith in the film adaptation A Face in the Crowd.
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.
His adherents wore baseball caps and T-shirts and tennis shoes and dresses made in Thailand. They were the bravest people on earth, bar none. They got incinerated in oil-well blowouts, crippled by tongs and chains on the drill floor, and hit by lightning laying pipe in a swamp in the middle of an electric storm, and they did it all without complaint. If you wanted to win a revolution, this was the bunch to get on your side. The same could be said if you wanted to throw the Constitution into the trash can.
“Young women feel safe in his company. Then they start feeling better about their situation and dump him.”
I know how that is.
The film crew had turned the yard into the setting of a French cotillion when the year was 1862 and the Yankees had been whipped at both First and Second Manassas and the Lost Cause was not lost at all.
Imaginary or not, the evening had become a tribute to a moment in history that would not come aborning again.
Even before I went to Vietnam, there was a disorder in my head that I never understood. The catalyst, I suspect, lay in the unconscious. For me, the trigger always had to do with degradation of the body and the spirit, cruelty to animals or children, sexual assault, a man beating a woman, betrayal, lies that stole the faith of another.
He’s a fascist who’s lying to all these poor people who think he’s going to make their lives better. But
