The phone went dead in my hand, and I looked at the smoky green surface of the water in the summer haze and poured another jigger of Jim Beam. What did they have on him? I wondered. Whores? Juice from narcotics? It seemed sometimes that the best of us became most like the people whom we loathed. And whenever a good cop took a big fall, he could never look back and find that exact moment when he made a hard left turn down a one-way street. I remembered sitting in a courtroom when an ex-major-league baseball pitcher from New Orleans was sentenced to ten years in Angola for extortion and trafficking in cocaine. Seventeen years earlier he had won twenty-five games, had thrown fast-balls that could destroy barn doors, and now he weighed three hundred pounds and walked as though a bowling ball were slung between his thighs. When asked if he had anything to say before sentencing, he stared up at the judge, the rings of fat on his neck trembling, and replied, “Your Honor, I have no idea how I got from there to here.”
I believed him, too. But as I sat in the warm breeze with the drowsy heat of the whiskey working in my head, my concern was not for Clete or an ex-baseball pitcher. I knew that my own fuse was lit, and it was only a matter of time before my banked fires would roar out of control in my life. I had never felt more alone, and I uttered a prayer that seemed a contradiction of everything I had learned back at the Catholic school: Dear God, my higher power, even though I’ve abandoned You, don’t abandon me.
