Robicheaux (Dave Robicheaux #21)

by James Lee Burke

But you don’t pull life preservers away from drowning people or deny an opiate or two to those who have taken up residence in the Garden of Gethsemane.

“The defense will put a scarlet letter on her brow,” I said.

“What’s her emotional state?” “Like a vase somebody dropped on a concrete floor,” she said.

As in most interviews with sexual assault victims, the dialogue, the violation of privacy, and the demeanor of the victim were excruciating.

“You deal wit’ your own snakes or you don’t, man. Sometimes you’re the only cat in the cathedral. Ain’t nobody else can do it for you.”

“He’s got bad skin. It’s thick, like leather. Like his eyes are looking out of holes.

I could see the uncertainty, the fear about her job, her paycheck, her relationship with her boss, the prospect of offending people with power and authority over others, the dark figure sitting in the shadows at the end of the bar when it’s closing time. I wondered how many people would understand her frame of reference.

“Can you talk to my cousin Emmeline?” “I heard she was your half sister.” “I’m not sure what she is. My father’s penis roved over five continents.

Sometimes I think life is a pile of shit. Sometimes I feel like putting my grits on the ceiling.”

I’ve always believed that alcoholism and depression are first cousins. This isn’t an excuse. It’s part of the menu. No one who has not experienced clinical or agitated depression, coupled with psychoneurotic anxiety, can appreciate a syndrome that, in an earlier time, was treated with a lobotomy. It’s a motherfucker, no matter what you call it or how you cut it. There’s blood in your sweat; your head feels like a basketball wrapped with barbed wire; you’d eat a razor blade for a half cup of Jack or a handful of reds or a touch of China white. There’s another alternative: the Big Exit, with both barrels propped under the chin, the way Hemingway did it.

For me, the presences that the early Celts tried to keep inside the trunks of trees by knocking on wood always came out in the evenings, particularly in spring and summer, when the crepe myrtle and the pale green of a weeping willow seemed at odds with each other. In the croaking of the frogs, the dying of the light, the tide rising along the banks of the Teche, I felt a sensation like spiritual malaria imprisoning my soul. In an instant the sky would turn to carbon. I think that’s why I sometimes went out to Spanish Lake at sunset.

“I’ve been to anger management class.” “That’s like managing bone cancer. The people who peddle that stuff are douchebags. It’s like listening to Pee-wee Herman talk about weight lifting.”

Like George Orwell, he believed the human spirit was unconquerable. 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.

I was old enough to know that insanity comes in many forms, some benign, some viral and capable of spreading across continents, but I believed I had just looked into the eyes of someone who was genuinely mad and probably not diagnosable, the kind of idealist who sets sail on the Pequod and declares war against the universe.

His face was as empty as a bread pan.

THAT EVENING BROUGHT rain and an ink-wash sky and the throbbing of hundreds of frogs. The air was sweet and cold,

“Why are you acting so weird?” “I’ll take weird over rational any day of the week,” I said.

CLETE PURCEL NORMALLY referred to cop shows on television as “the most recent shit Hollywood is foisting on really stupid people.”

Female detectives do not show off their cleavage.

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, like the story of the Flood and new beginnings and loading the animals two by two onto the Ark. I love the mist hanging in the trees, a hint of wraiths that would not let heavy stones weigh them down in their graves, the raindrops clicking on the lily pads, the fish rising as though in celebration.

If anyone tells you he’s from New Orleans and doesn’t drink, he’s probably not from New Orleans.

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. In most cases, there is none.

“Traumatized people don’t behave rationally,” he said.

The sun was white in the sky, the bayou a dirty chocolate color, dragonflies hanging over the cattails.

It was funny how life replicated the tarot rather than the other way around. Maybe that was how thought worked. You had the thought, then the thought became the thing.

It’s a phenomenon that seems unique to South Louisiana, like a sea change, as if the natural world is reversing itself and correcting an oversight. The barometer will drop unexpectedly, the bayou will swell and remain placid at the same time, and suddenly, rain rings will dimple the surface from one bank to the other. Fish sense the change in barometric pressure and begin feeding on the surface in anticipation of the rain that will wash food from the trees into the stream or

If there are angels among us, as St. Paul suggests, I believed Clete was one of them, his wings auraed with smoke, his cloak rolled in blood, his sword broken in battle but unsurrendered and unsheathed, a protector whose genus went back to Thermopylae and Masada.

“Ever look into her eyes? Two inkwells, midnight blue. She has antifreeze for blood.”