Robicheaux (Dave Robicheaux #21)

by James Lee Burke

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.

“You know what they say at meetings. Coincidence is your Higher Power acting with anonymity.” “I didn’t know you were in the program.” “I’m not. I go for the dialogue. It’s great material.”

Any cop who is honest will tell you there are police officers in our midst who never should have been given power over others. Misogamy is a big part of their makeup. Sexual perversity as well. I’ve known both male and female vice cops who have the psychological makeup of degenerates and closet sadists. I’ve also known gunbulls who would have had no problem working in Dachau. That we protect them is beyond my comprehension. The hundreds of cops and firemen who went into the Towers on 9/11 knew they probably would not come out. What are the limits of human courage? The cops and firemen who walked into stairwells that were not stairwells but chimneys filled with flame and smoke, proved that the human spirit is unconquerable, and it is these men and women who define what is best in us.

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.

Prostitution and drug trafficking cannot exist in a community without sanction. Vice is symbiotic and, like a leech, must attach itself to a cooperative host. That’s not hard to do. Once it’s established, digging it out of the tissue takes years, maybe generations. The majority of victims are people no one cares about. Even though the street sales seem nickel-and-dime in nature, the aggregate can be enormous.

I felt my eyes closing and a great fatigue seeping through my body, one that I did not argue with, in the same way that, at a certain age, you do not argue with the pull of the earth.

But I could not say liquor wasn’t on my mind. I could not only smell it, I was drawn to it the way a bee is drawn to flowers. The bottles on the back counter rang with light. I could almost taste the foam and brassy bead of the beer splashing from the spigot into a big ice-crusted mug, the whiskey brimming on the edges of a shot glass, the Collins mix and shaved ice and mint leaves in tropical drinks made with vodka and rum and gin. I could not explain the metabolic craving that had brought me nothing but sickness and misery, not to mention a murderous rage that was often the surrogate for the booze I couldn’t get enough of.

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.

“The past has no reality. The world belongs to the living.” “You know better. You see them in the mists out at Spanish Lake.” “See whom?” “I love you for your diction, if nothing else. The boys in butternut. You see them slogging through the cypresses.” “Who told you that?” “They did,” he replied.