Robicheaux [18] The Glass Rainbow by James Lee Burke

Author:James Lee Burke [Burke, James Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Suspense, General, Mystery & Detective, Mystery Fiction, Louisiana, Robicheaux; Dave (Fictitious character), New Iberia (La.), New Iberia, Police Procedural, Police - Louisiana - New Iberia, Police
ISBN: 9781439128299
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2010-07-13T05:00:00+00:00

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

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