CHAPTER 14
THE PECULIARITY OF entering one’s eighth decade is that questions regarding theology do not sharpen but instead become less significant. Better said, need for proof of the supernatural becomes less imperative. At a certain point, perhaps we realize that we have been surrounded by the connections between the material and the unseen world all our lives, but for various reasons, we chose not to see them.
Years ago dead members of my platoon used to call me up long-distance during electrical storms. So did my murdered wife, Annie. A psychiatrist told me I was experiencing a psychotic break. But cold sober and free of all the ghosts I had brought back from a land of rice paddies and elephant grass and hills that looked like the summer-browned breasts of Asian women, I had seen my father standing in the surf south of Point Au Fer, the rain tinking on the hard hat he was wearing when he died in an offshore blowout. In the oil field, he had always been called Big Aldous Robicheaux, as though the three words were one. In his barroom fistfights, he took on all comers two and three at a time, exploding his fists on his adversaries’ faces with the dispassionate ease of a baseball player swatting balls in a batting cage. My mother’s infidelities filled him with feelings of sorrow and anger and personal impotence, and in turn his drunkenness and irresponsibility robbed her of any happiness she’d ever had and finally any possibility of belief in herself. My parents ruined their marriage, then their home and their family. But in death, when the wellhead blew out far below the monkey board on the rig where he was racking pipe, Big Aldous clipped his safety belt onto the Geronimo wire and jumped into the blackness, brave to the end, swallowed under a derrick that collapsed like melting licorice on top of him. A survivor said Big Aldous was smiling when he bailed into the stars. And that’s the way I have always remembered my old man, and I have come to learn that memory and presence are inextricably connected and should never be thought of as separate entities.
So I have never argued with people about the specters I have seen or the voices I’ve heard inside the static of a long-distance phone call. I know that the dead are out there, beckoning from the shadows, perhaps pointing the way for the rest of us. But I don’t fear them, and I conceive of them as friends whom I don’t think I’ll mind joining. It’s not a bad way to be.
Early in the A.M. the day after Vidor Perkins’s visit to my office, I woke in the grayness of the dawn to the clanking sounds of the drawbridge at Burke Street. The fog had rolled up Bayou Teche from the Gulf and hung like wet strips of gray rag on the ground and in the oak trees. I fed Tripod and Snuggs, then fixed a fried-egg and bacon sandwich and took it and a cup of coffee and hot milk and a folding chair down the slope of my backyard. I sat down by the water’s edge and ate breakfast and watched Tripod and Snuggs come down the slope and join me, sniffing at the breeze, their tails flipping back and forth. The green and red lights on the drawbridge were smudged inside the fog, the steel girders hardly visible. Evidently the great cogged wheels that raised and lowered the bridge had gotten stuck. Then I heard the machinery clank and bang loudly, and each side of the bridge rose at forty-five-degree angles into the air and what I thought was a huge two-deck quarterboat slid through the open space and came down the bayou toward me, a hissing sound rising from its stern.
But it was not an offshore quarterboat. It was a nineteenth-century paddle wheeler, with twin fluted stacks, a lamp burning inside the pilothouse. A massive bare-chested black man, wearing no shoes and dressed only in a pair of flared work trousers, was coiling and stacking a thick length of oiled rope on the bow. The side door to the pilothouse was open, and inside I could see a skipper at the wheel, smoking a cob pipe and wearing a billed mariner’s cap and a dark blue coat with big buttons. He seemed to study me, then removed his pipe from his mouth and touched the bill of his cap. I waved back at him, unsure what I was seeing. I thought the boat was a replica, one with screws under it, perhaps part of a tourist promotion of some kind. But I saw a woman in a hooped dress standing in a breezeway, looking at me as though I were an oddity she didn’t understand; then the stern passed not ten yards from me, the ground quaking with the roar of the steam engines, cascades of silt and yellow water sliding off the paddle wheel.
I put my food down and stood up from my chair and stared in disbelief as the bow and the lighted pilothouse and the rows of passenger compartments and the woman in the hooped crinoline dress and the stern of the boat were enveloped by the fog, the wake landing on the bank with a loud slap.
“Dave?” I heard someone say.
I turned around. Alafair was standing twenty feet behind me in her bathrobe and slippers.
“Did you see that?” I asked.
“See what?”
“That double-decker that just went by.”
“No, I didn’t see anything. What are you doing down here?”
“The drawbridge was stuck. It woke me up. A paddle wheeler just went down the bayou.”
She walked down to the water’s edge, leaning forward, peering southward into the fog. “Just now?”
“Thirty seconds ago.”
She looked at me strangely. I took out my pocketknife and cut my sandwich in half and handed her my plate with the half on it that I had not bitten into. But she ignored the gesture. “You’re telling me you just saw a riverboat, the kind with the big paddle wheel in back?” she said.
I sat down next to her and glanced at the eastern sky. “How about that sunrise? Isn’t that something?” I said.
If you’re lucky, at a certain age you finally learn not to contend with the world or try to explain that the application of reason has little or nothing to do with the realities that exist just on the other side of one’s fingertips.
THAT SAME MORNING, Clete Purcel drove to the cottage on Bayou Teche that Emma Poche rented just outside St. Martinville. It was a restored cypress structure, perhaps over a century old, unpainted, set back in deep shade under live oaks, its small gallery hung with baskets of impatiens. Emma’s car was parked on the grass under a tree, a back window half down. On the seat he could see an oversize tennis racquet and a can of balls. The surface of the bayou was wrinkling in the breeze. In the distance he could see a graveyard filled with whitewashed crypts and the back of the nightclub where he had torn Herman Stanga apart.
It was Emma’s day off. When she came to the screen door, she was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, her face unwashed and lined with sleep. She gazed at him a moment and said, “What do you want, Clete?”
“To take you to breakfast,” he said.
“What’s the point? It’s over.”
“If you say so. But it shouldn’t end over a misunderstanding about that pen. Any one of a half-dozen skells could have creeped my place, somebody working for the guy who popped Stanga.”
He could barely make out her features through the grayness of the screen. Her eyes were lowered, as though she were considering his words. “I need to get in the shower. Fix some coffee if you want,” she said. She unsnapped the latch on the door and walked toward the back of the cottage. A few moments later, while he poured coffee grinds in the top of an old-time drip pot, he heard the sound of water hitting on the tin walls of the shower stall. A wood-bladed fan spun slowly on the ceiling of the living room. The furnishings in the room were sparse and looked thread-worn or purchased secondhand. A bookcase next to the television set contained mostly popular music CDs and a few paperback editions of novels that seemed to have no thematic connection and probably had been picked up at yard sales. But one book caught his eye. It was a blue hardcover and was stamped with the words THE BOOK OF ALCOHOLICS ANONYMOUS. Clete picked it up and sat down in a stuffed chair that puffed up dust when his buttocks sank into the seat cushion. He opened the book and heard the spine make a cracking sound. On the title page, someone had written:
To Emma,
With hopes that you won’t misplace this one.
All the best from your easy-does-it friend,
Tookie
Clete replaced the book on the shelf. Emma came out of the back dressed in a fresh pair of jeans and a cowboy shirt. She had put on makeup and perfume and earrings and looked lovely framed against the window and the view of the trees and the bayou outside.
