James Burke - A Private Cathedral

“A Mexican got shanked in the chow line. I was in the vicinity.”

“You didn’t do it?”

“I’d joog a guy when I’m about to go home?”

“Yeah, if he got in your face, you would,” I said.

The sun was a dull red in the west, and I could see dust devils spinning out of a cotton field, breaking apart in the wind. Six mounted gun bulls were silhouetted like black cutouts against a horizon that could have been the lip of the Abyss. “Didn’t you work for the Balangie family?”

“Briefly.”

“I ran into Isolde Balangie last night. At an amusement pier. She was there to see Johnny Shondell.”

“Get the fuck outta here.”

“Teenage girls aren’t drawn to guys like Johnny Shondell?”

“The Balangie and the Shondell families get along like shit on ice cream.”

“What if I told you Isolde Balangie was being delivered to Mark Shondell?”

“ ‘Delivered,’ like to be deflowered?”

“I don’t think she’ll be working in the kitchen,” I said.

I stood up and rattled the door for the screw. Marcel blew out his breath. “I need a sponsor if I’m gonna get out-of-state parole.”

“I have a serious character defect, Marcel,” I said. “I don’t like people using me.”

“Your mother probably got knocked up by a whiskey bottle, but you’re on the square. You know the people on the parole board.”

“You need to rethink how you talk to other people, Marcel,” I said.

“Come on, Dave. I’m telling you the troot’. I want to go straight.”

“What’s the information?”

“Sit down.”

“No.”

The room was growing hotter. I could smell his odor, the dirt and cotton poison, the sweaty socks that probably hung on a line in his cell and never dried, the fermented pruno that was a constant cause of inmate incontinence.

“I ain’t asking much,” he said.

I haven’t been honest. I wasn’t there out of humanity or duty. I was there because I wanted to believe that evil has an explainable origin, one that has nothing to do with unseen forces or even a cancerous flaw in the midst of Creation, and that even the worst of men could reclaim the light they had banished from their souls. I retook my seat. His eyes resembled hundreds of tiny blue-green chips of glass.

“New Orleans was the staging area for the hit on John Kennedy,” he said.

“Old news,” I said. “No, not just old. Ancient.”

“I knew one of the guys in on it. He was an enforcer for the Mob in Brooklyn. His street name was Chicken Cacciatore. I ain’t putting you on. He got mixed up with the CIA and some blackmail schemes in Miami.”

I knew the name of the man he was talking about. He worked for the Miami Better Business Bureau and received paychecks from one of our national political parties as well. He also ran a car-theft ring. I knew that no one could have cared less.

“You just gonna look at me like that?” he said.

“I’ll see if I can help out with the interstate parole situation.”

“No kidding?”

“Why not? You said you’re going straight.”

“Like maybe you can get me a job?”

“Got any car wash experience?”

He lowered his eyes. He shrugged. “I’m up for whatever it takes.”

“That was a joke. You’d better not burn me, Marcel.”

“You still tight with Clete Purcel?” he said.

“He’s my best friend.”

“That’s like saying clap is my favorite shade of pink.”

I rattled the door again and this time called for the screw. “Don’t get your expectations up.”

“Come here,” he said.

There it was, the dictatorial command, the smugness and condescension that constitute the tone of every narcissist. I stepped toward him. “Change your tone,” I replied.

“I tole you I had some information. I was working your crank. I can’t do time no more. I got too many bad things in my head. Maybe I got to get something off my conscience.”

I didn’t want to become his confessor. But neither was I an admirer of the Texas prison system. I propped my arms on the table, my back to the door, blocking the screw’s view of Marcel. His face was narrow and furrowed, his cheeks unshaved, dirty-looking, as though rubbed with soot.

“I was the driver on a whack for the Balangie family,” he said. “The guy was a child molester. He’s in the swamp on the north side of Lake Pontchartrain. There’s people in New Iberia who want to know where he’s at.”

“I don’t.”

“Are you serious?” he said.

Like most recidivists, Marcel had spent much of his life inside the system, and his knowledge of the outside world was like a collection of old postcards someone had to explain to him.

“Hey, you listening?” he said. “There’s no statute of limitations on homicide.”

“Put it in your memoir,” I said.

“Why’d you come here?”

“I wondered if you were born without a conscience or if you made yourself that way.”

“You cocksucker.”

“I’ll see what I can do about the parole.”

“I don’t want your help. Stay away from me. Don’t use my name.”

“A deal is a deal,” I said. “You’re stuck with me, Marcel. Disrespect my mother again and I’ll break your jaw.”

Ten minutes later, as I walked outside through the redbrick complex, I wondered which building had housed the electric chair, called Old Sparky by people who thought shaving the hair off a human being and strapping him to a chair and affixing a metal cap to his scalp and frying him alive was the stuff of humor. I also wondered again if the entirety of our species descended from the same antediluvian soup. My guess is that our origins are far more diverse; I also believe that the truth would terrify most of us. What if we had to accept the fact that we pass on the seed of the lizard in our most loving and romantic moments? That the scales of the serpent are at the corners of our eyes, that bloodlust can have its first awakening when the infant’s mouth finds the mother’s nipple?

I returned to new Iberia and my shotgun house on East Main, not far from the famed antebellum home called the Shadows. I was living the life of a widower back then, in the days before 9/11, a recluse trying to hide from my most destructive addictions, Jack on the rocks with a beer back and my love affair with the state of Louisiana, also known as the Great Whore of Babylon. For me she has always been the embodiment of every vice on the menu, starting with racetracks and bourré tables and casinos and lakes of gin and vodka and sour mash and hookup joints with a honky-tonk special on every stool aching to get it on in four/four time.

Think I’m giving you a shuck? People of color have a saying: If you’re black on Saturday night, you’ll never want to be white again. The same kind of thinking applies in Louisiana, but on a wider scale and not on a basis of race or the day of the week. The southern half of the state is the cultural equivalent of the Baths of Caracalla; the only difference is the coon-ass accents and the fact the slop chutes never close. I knew a famous country musician who moved to a farmhouse in Carencro to get sober, even surrendering his car keys to his wife. Yeah, I know, with the help of A.A, miracles happen and you can get sober anywhere. That’s what the musician’s wife thought until Mardi Gras kicked into gear and her husband drove the lawn mower eight miles down the highway to Lafayette so he could march in the parade and get soused out of his mind.

I fished in the evening with a cane pole among people of color, and watched the August light drain out of the sky and gather inside the oaks and disappear on the bayou’s surface in a long brassy band that, as a child, I believed was a conduit to infinity. It was a strange way to be, I guess. I had been suspended or fired from three law enforcement agencies, and even though I was relatively young, I felt the tug of the earth at eveningtide and a gnawing hole in my stomach that told me the great mysteries would always remain the great mysteries, and that the war between good and evil was so vast and unknowable in nature and origin that my ephemeral efforts meant absolutely nothing.