James Burke: Robicheaux

“I’m with Jimmy Nightingale and Levon and his wife.”

“You’re kidding.” He strained his neck to see into the dining room. “Oops, I shouldn’t have looked.”

“What do you mean?”

“That Australian broad gets to me. My big boy just went on red alert.”

“Will you stop that?”

“I know an animal when I see one.”

“I mean it, Clete.” But what was the point? Clete was Clete. “Join us. I feel like I’m in the middle of a blender.”

“I can’t take Nightingale. I know he’s cutting me a deal, but he’s still a bum and a fraud.”

“But it’s fine for me?” I said.

“Stop pretending. Nightingale hates my guts. I don’t know what you see in that prick. Anyway, he’s doing a favor for you, not me. He wants something from Levon Broussard. So does Tony Nine Ball.”

“Where’d you hear this?”

“From Nig Rosewater.”

Nig and Wee Willie Bimstine had run New Orleans’s oldest bail bond service, until Katrina drowned the city and FEMA transported their clients all over the United States, never to return.

“Tony thinks he’s going to be a Hollywood movie producer,” Clete said. “He bought this sword to give to Levon Broussard, except Nightingale took it away from him.”

“When did Fat Tony start rolling over for anyone?”

“He’s got diabetes and emphysema and cancer in his colon and lymph nodes. He carries a bucket in his car to puke in.”

The bartender leaned close to Clete. “Would you like another drink, sir?”

Clete lifted his mug, the shell of ice sliding down the sides, the beer almost to the top. “Do I look like I need one? But since you asked, give Dave a diet Doc with cherries and limes in it.”

The man on the other side of Clete left the bar, and I took his stool with no plan in mind other than to delay rejoining the group I’d come with. In seconds I felt at home, the television set tuned to a sports channel, stuffed shrimp I hadn’t ordered placed on a paper napkin in front of me, someone talking about the New Orleans Saints. Clete ordered a shot and poured it into his mug. I watched the whiskey bounce on the bottom and rise in a brown cloud.

“Why not just put your brain in a jar and give it to a medical school?” I said.

“I did that five years ago. They gave it back.”

He chugged half the mug. I bit into a stuffed shrimp and looked over my shoulder at the dining room, then at the icy cloud rising from the beer box, the bartenders uncorking bottles of Liebfraumilch and dark red wine, fitting an orange slice on the rim of a Collins glass, tipping a jigger of Jack into shaved ice and mint leaves, pouring a creamy-pink gin fizz, setting up a round of Hennessy for everyone, provided by the distributor.

“No?” the bartender said, after setting a shot glass in front of me.

I cleared my throat to answer.

“Did he ask for one?” Clete said.

“Sorry, my mistake,” the bartender said.

“Give us both a diet Doc. I need a bowl of gumbo, too,” Clete said.

“You got it,” the bartender said.

“Where you from?” Clete asked.

“California.”

“You ever hear of the Bobbsey Twins from Homicide?”

“That’s a new one on me,” the bartender said. He wore a white jacket, his hair slicked back.

“You’re looking at them,” Clete said. “You’re standing in the middle of history.”

“Knock it off, Clete,” I said.

“He knows I’m kidding,” Clete said. “You, what’s-your-name, you don’t take people like me seriously, do you?”

“My name is Cedric.”

“You knew I was kidding, right, Cedric?”

The bartender wiped the bar. “Two diet drinks coming up.”

He walked away on the duckboards, wadding up his bar rag, tossing it into a sink. My face felt small and tight; my eardrums were ringing. “Don’t do that again, Clete.”

“He’s foisting drinks on people. I set him straight.”

“Did you hear me?”

“Climb down off it, Streak.”

“Off what?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

“No, I don’t,” I said.

“I gave up trying to pork everything in sight. Why? Because I’m old and I make an idiot of myself. It’s called recognizing your limitations.”

“See you later,” I said.

“Come back here.”

But I kept walking, letting the noise in the dining room swallow up my conversation with Clete and the temptations that were as abiding in me as sexual desire and, even worse, that had to do with guns and gambling and the rush of stepping through the dimension into a place I never wanted to go again.

Levon and Rowena and Jimmy were sloshed and had stupid smiles on their faces when I got to the table.

“Sorry, something just came up,” I said.

“You’re leaving?” Levon said.

“We’ll do it another time,” I said. “Thanks for inviting me.”

“You got your nose bent out of shape?” Rowena said. “Just throw the food to the hogs?”

“Chacun à son goût,” I said.

Then I walked out of the dining room and past the revelers at the bar, including Clete, and out the door and into the night. The street was empty, the great looming structure called the Shadows illuminated by floodlights in the yard, a tribute to all the suffering passed down to us by the antebellum era. What a joke, I thought.

But my cynicism gave me no release from the fire and the insatiable need burning inside me.

Clete called me at the office in the morning. “I’m sorry about last night,” he said.

“Forget it. I had my head on sideways,” I said.

“You didn’t go home and get wasted, did you?”

“Worry about yourself,” I said.

“I’ll see you for lunch.”

“I’ve got too much desk work.”

“I’ll come by tonight. It’s about that prick.”

“Which prick?”

“That prick Nightingale, who else? I’ve got to pick up a bail skip in Jennings. I’ll see you about nine.”

At five-fifteen P.M., I threw my tackle box and rod and reel into the back of my truck, hooked up my boat and trailer, and drove to the Henderson levee, outside Breaux Bridge. Henderson Swamp is part of the vast network of bayous and bays and rivers that constitute the Atchafalaya Basin, the flooded woods a golden green at sunset and so swollen with silence that you wonder if this piece of primordial creation was saved by a divine hand to remind us of what the earth was like when our ancestors grew feet and crawled out of the sea.

The cypress trees were in early leaf, as delicate as green lace, ruffling in the breeze, the water high and black and undisturbed, chained with lily pads, the bream and goggle-eye perch rolling under the pads like pillows of air floating to the surface.

I cut my outboard and let my boat glide silently into a cove lit by a molten red sun, then flipped my plug in an arching loop just beyond a clutch of flooded willows. The western sky was streaked with clouds as pink as flamingo wings. In the distance I heard the Southern Pacific blowing down the line.

But if I had come here for solace, my journey was in vain. The loss of my wife, my inability to accept the suddenness of the accident, the words of a paramedic telling me she was gone and they had done everything they could, his mouth moving like that of someone in a film with no sound track, I carried all these things wherever I went, my blood and mind fouled, the ground shifting, the realization at sunrise that her death was not a dream and she was gone forever, unfairly taken, her dignity and courage and spiritual resolve extinguished by a fool rounding a curve in a pickup truck, the accelerator mashed to the floor.

These thoughts robbed the light from my eyes, the birdsong from the trees, the sound of children playing in a park. Instead of the glory of the sunset, I saw beer cans and Styrofoam cups undulating in the shallows, a rubber tire submerged among the willows, a blanket of debris caught in the cattails, as viscous as dried paint skimmed off the top of a paint bucket.