James Burke - A Private Cathedral

“Ain’t your bidness, Fat Man,” she said. “Don’t be messing in it.”

“You did that, asshole?” Clete said to Ray.

“You’d better beat feet, pal,” Ray said. “If you—”

Clete’s fist was almost the size of a cantaloupe. He drove it into the center of Ray’s face and sent him crashing into a breakfast table and chair. Then he kicked the door shut and picked up the chair and broke it on Ray’s head.

“I ax for it, Fat Man,” Li’l Face said. “I got a baby. He know where I stay at.”

“Why’d he hit you?”

She shook her head.

“Answer me, Li’l Face.”

“He wanted me to do things like Zipper made me do. He tried to put his—”

“I got the picture,” Clete said.

He ripped the sheet off the bed and wrapped it around Ray’s throat, then dragged him squirming and twisting into the bathroom, spittle running from the corners of his mouth. Clete drove his head into the toilet bowl and slammed down the seat, then mounted it and began jumping up and down on it like a giant white ape, crushing Ray’s head into the shape of a football, blood stippling the bowl.

“He’s strangling, Fat Man,” Li’l Face said.

“Get his wallet and take whatever you want, then go home,” Clete said.

She pulled the wallet from Ray’s back pocket. Clete thought he felt a whoosh of air in the room, then he smelled the odor of rain and wet trees. He turned and saw Li’l Face squeeze past a tall man by the bed. She dropped the wallet and ran for the front door. The man pointed a nine-millimeter at Clete’s chest. “Get down.”

“You’re Timothy Riordan,” Clete said. “I got your photo.”

“My friends call me Timmy. You can call me the guy who’s about to print your brains on the wall.”

Clete held up one hand. “I’m coming.” He stepped down, balancing himself. “Things got out of control. We can work this out.”

“You wish, blimpo.”

Clete entered what he sometimes called “the moment.” Someone points a gun at you and lets it wander over your body as arbitrarily as the red dot on a laser sight. Eternity and what it holds or may not hold is one blink away. The round in the chamber will probably tear through your sternum or heart or lungs, carrying bits of you into the wall. The pain will be like a firecracker exploding inside your chest. You will not be blown backward or spin in a circle, as shooting victims are portrayed in motion pictures. You will drop straight to the floor, like a collapsed puppet, and lie in a fetal position and feel your blood pool around you. If you are lucky, your tormentor will not try to increase your pain and fear. All because you made the wrong choice during “the moment.”

So what do you do?

“You’re quite a guy,” Clete said. “I’ve seen your jacket. You worked vice. You were getting freebies up on Airline. You liked to knock around Vietnamese girls. Where’d you get your piece? Off a crippled newsy? You like movies? I do. Humphry Bogart says something like that in The Maltese Falcon. ”

Timothy Riordan blinked. Clete grabbed the frame of the nine-millimeter and twisted and simultaneously kicked him in the shin. Then he twisted some more, until Timothy’s face folded in upon itself and a simpering voice rose from his mouth and tears slid from his eyes.

It should have been over. The gun was on the floor. Clete had his blackjack halfway out of his coat pocket. Then it caught on the flap, and in two seconds Timothy had a stiletto in his hand, the blade oiled and rippling with light and streaked with the whisker-like marks of a whetstone. He sank it in Clete’s arm.

Clete felt the blade strike bone. A wave of nausea swept through his body. His loins turned to water; his sphincter started to cave.

He tried to speak, but his mouth wouldn’t work. His fist landed in the middle of Timothy’s face, slinging blood on a lamp shade, probably breaking his nose and front teeth, bouncing him off the wall. Clete pulled the stiletto from his arm and flung it across the room, then stomped Timothy’s head with the flat of his shoe and dragged him to a side window and crashed him headfirst through the venetian blinds and glass. He left him hanging half outside, like a giant clothespin.

Ray was trying to get up from the bathroom floor, propping himself with one arm on the toilet. Clete kicked his feet out from under him. “This has been a lot of fun,” he said. “I really dig your threads. Keep a cool stool. But if you even look at Li’l Face, I’ll pull your teeth, Keith. Or make you real dead, Fred. Have a nice night.”

Two days later, Clete sat with me on the back steps of the shotgun house I owned on Bayou Teche, deep in the shadows of oak trees that were two hundred years old. He was perhaps the most complex man I ever knew. His addictions and gargantuan appetites and thespian displays were utilized by his enemies to demean and trivialize and dismiss him. His vulnerability with women — or, rather, his adoration of them — led him again and again into disastrous affairs. The ferocity of his violence put the fear of God into child abusers and rapists and misogynists, but it was also used against him by insurance companies and law enforcement agencies that wanted him buried in Angola.

He was the trickster of folklore, a modern Sancho Panza, a quasi-psychotic jarhead who did two tours in Vietnam and came home with the Navy Cross and two Purple Hearts and memories he shared with no one. Few people knew the real Clete Purcel or the little boy who lived inside him, the lonely child of an alcoholic milkman who made his son kneel all night on rice grains and whipped him regularly with a razor strop. Nor did they know the man who served tea on his fire escape to a mamasan he accidently killed. Nor did they know the NOPD patrolman who wept when he couldn’t save the child he wrapped in a blanket, ran through flames, and crashed through a second-story window with, landing on top of a Dumpster.

Maybe his collective experience was responsible for an even more bizarre aspect of his personality. Years ago he tore a black-and-white photograph from a pictorial history of World War II and carried it inside a celluloid pouch in his wallet. The photograph showed a stooped woman walking up a dirt road with her three small daughters. The woman and the children wore rags tied on their heads and cheap coats on their backs. The smallest child was little more than a toddler. The viewer could not see what was at the end of the road. There were no trees or grass in the background, only an electric fence. The photograph was taken at Auschwitz. The cutline in the photo stated that the woman and her children were on their way to the gas chamber.

Once, when Clete and I were hammered in Sharkey Bonano’s Dream Room, I asked him why he would want to carry such a gruesome photo on his person.

“So I don’t forget,” he said.

“The Holocaust?”

“No, the guys who ran those places. I’d like to get my hands on some guys like that. Maybe some of those neo-Nazis marching around with the Confederate flag.”

I don’t think Clete was talking just about Nazis. He hated evil and waged war against it everywhere he found it. I sometimes wondered if he was an archangel in disguise, one with strings of dirty smoke rising from his wings, a full-fledged participant in fighting the good fight of Saint Paul. Maybe that was a foolish way to think, but I never knew anyone else like him. Trying to explain his origins was a waste of time. The way I saw it, if Clete Purcel didn’t have biblical dimensions, who did?

His left arm was in a sling; his right hand was curved around a sixteen-ounce Styrofoam cup of coffee. The trees were dripping, the bayou swollen and yellow and carpeted with rain rings.

“Those two guys didn’t dime you?” I said.